The Most Important Presidential Quality

I haven’t posted on this blog in a long time because I’ve been busy educating myself. I’m still not anywhere close to done, and probably never will be, but the more I study the founding of the United States and observe what’s going on in Washington, the more I realize things are upside down, and not just since Obama came into office. Things have been upside down for 100 years, and both Republicans and Democrats are to blame. The problem is power, and where it’s based.

Our founders saw that power, concentrated in a central authority (like a king) led to tyranny. They knew they didn’t want that. They also saw that power, given 100% to the people, was anarchy, and that when people got tired of anarchy, they turned to a “strong hand” to restore order, and that generally meant a dictator/king/tyrant, etc. Both extremes led to the same outcome. The object of the creation of the United States was to find the proper balance between “power to the people” and a central authority.

But what we have today is like what our founders envisioned only in part. Where things have gotten out of whack is with the amount of power held by the central authority, that is, the federal government, rather than the states. The founders did not intend for the federal government to be powerless, but they never intended it to be as powerful as it is today relative to the states. They wanted to keep as much power as close to the people as possible, and only give as much power to the federal government as was absolutely necessary for it to carry out the purposes they envisioned for it (as spelled out in the Constitution). The country got off to a shaky start, and there have been some major problems along the way, and of course there are individual exceptions, but it’s hard to make the case that overall things haven’t worked out pretty well.

But things are not as good as they could be, and there is a more and more realistic possibility they will get much worse. Much of the problem stems from the imbalance of power between the federal government and the states. The problem areas are simple to identify, they are; 1) money, and 2) laws and regulations. That is, most government spending should be made at the state level, but it is not. The federal budget is much, much larger than the combined budgets of the states. And there are far to many laws made at a federal level in areas that should be left up to the states. A good case study is our educational system. Money leaves the states in the form of taxes, goes the federal government, and then the federal government gives money back to the states for education. Why does the money need to leave the states in the first place? Why doesn’t the federal government leave education 100% up to the states to manage? This would remove the divisive topic from Washington and restrict it to each state can work it out, so that the people can decide what kind of system they want. This would create the kind of experimentation the founders envisioned, in which each state had the opportunity to try things out and see what worked, and in theory the states would learn from one another. This has been credibly demonstrated by Massachusetts experimenting with universal health care without the consequences needing to be inflicted on the other 49 states. If each state had total freedom to educate its students without interference from the federal government, how much faster would we arrive at the best methods of education?

The problem is not Obama. It’s not George Bush. It’s not Democrats, and it’s not Republicans. The problem is anyone who transfers power from the states to the federal government, whether intentionally or unintentionally. What I want to see in a presidential candidate is someone whose primary purpose, after national defense, will be to return power to the states. How will we know if he/she is doing their job? Because the number of laws will shrink, and the national budget will shrink. I’d like to see a reduction in the federal budget to somewhere in the range of 1-5% of what it is currently. If someone could make the credible case for doing this, that would be someone I could get excited about supporting. This, to me, is the most important presidential quality, the tearing down of federal power and returning it to the people, that is, the states, rather than building it up in Washington at the expense of the states.