The word Constitutional in Constitutional Entrepreneur refers to living and governing in accordance with the full United States Constitution, as amended, as it was originally intended.

Constitutional Entrepreneurs believe in Constitutionally Valid Government.  There is an emense body of wisdom in our Constitution.  A central part of that wisdom is that the US Federal Government should exercise only the powers explicitly granted to it by the Constitution.  The major categories of power that the Federal Government can legitimately exercise are as follows:

• Financing the Federal Government.
• Providing for the Common Defense [with respect to the conduct of military conflict].
• Establishing immigration and naturalization policy,
• Promoting the General Welfare [not subsidizing particular companies, industries, individuals or groups]
• Criminalizing currency counterfeiting, piracy, and violations of the laws of nations.
• Creating and administering the District of Columbia
• A few other miscellaneous functions.
• Creating laws to facilitate execution of federal government functions specified by the Constitution.

The Constitution’s 10^th Amendment (which is probably the part of the Constitution that we have ignored most) says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  This means that that other powers and functions not explicitly given to the Federal Government must be funded and executed by the States[1] and people.

Examples of Federal Government functions which illegitimately takes money from taxpayers and future generations to fund…

• Corporate Welfare. The unprincipled and unjust payments and regulatory mandates for favored businesses and industries. Examples include requirements and subsidies to support the ethanol industry, subsidies and anti-trust exceptions for insurance companies, and subsidies and tax breaks for green energy research and system development.
• Unearned Lifestyle Subsidies (Welfare) For Individuals (even if those funds are administered through the states). Examples include Food Stamps, Medicade and other subsidized health insurance, housing subsidies (including subsidized flood and storm insurance), student loans, and the Earned Income Tax Credit.  The departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) should be eliminated.
• All education should be the responsibility of state and local government.  The Department of Education should be eliminated.
• Social Security and Medicare are no sustainable in their present form. Retirement ages for these programs should be increased.  Replacing these programs with approaches developed by the states will take time.  And, because so many millions of American citizens have contributed substantially to these programs over the years, current beneficiaries should not be penalized.
• Infrastructure Projects. Construction and repair of roads, bridges, power plants, sewage treatment plants, etc. should be funded by the states and local jurisdictions in which those projects are located.  The Federal Government can legitimately fund the very small percentage of road and bridge construction and repair that support the US Postal Service.

 

The Federal Government…

• Has grown far beyond what the Constitution permits. This growth has repressed our liberty, made that Government a tool of special interests instead of a means for promoting the welfare of our citizens in general, and in many other ways has made it more of a burden than a benefit.
• Should not be free to implement anything that some political pressure group feels is a good idea.
• Cannot make decisions about or implement those functions nearly as effectively in the long run as can the individual states and the entrepreneurial power of our citizens.

The Constitution’s limits on the Federal Government should be reimposed, and not just because to do so follows the letter of the law.  They should be reimposed for pragmatic reasons such as:

• The Federal debt is not sustainable and constitutes theft from current taxpayers and taxpayers in future generations. When a person or a government borrows with no intention to repay, that’s theft!
  • The Federal Government is over $20 trillion dollars in debt. That’s over $170,000 for every United States taxpayer.  Those numbers roughly doubled under the Obama Administration.  Over 13% of the Federal Government’s budget each year is spent just on the interest on that debt.  And those numbers are growing.  To put it in perspective, imagine paying 13% of your family’s budget on credit card interest.  The Federal Government spends 13% if its budget on interest too.  These trends are not sustainable.
  • States cannot borrow as irresponsibly as can the Federal Government, so shifting significant functions of government to the states means that those functions are more likely to be prioritized and funded more responsibly.
  • Federal debt is being bloated more each year with no plans for repayment to subsidize the current  life styles and pet projects of favored pressure groups, not the general welfare of taxpayers and citizens.
  • Both Democrats and corporate welfare Republicans are to blame, although not to the same degree.

• Our nation has faces many problems that have been made worse by an over-reaching Federal Government.
  • Our communities face many problems such as inadequate healthcare, public safety (especially with respect to domestic violence issues), and education, poverty, drug addiction, homelessness, and affordable housing.
  • Federal government solutions tend to be one-size-fits all and in many cases have made the problems worse. For example, our War on Poverty has lasted over 50 years and has failed.
    • We have merely subsidized continued poverty (just making it more comfortable) and incentivized people to remain in poverty, to a much larger extent than we have solved it.  We’ve done this by paying people over at least three generations to remain chronically unemployed and dependent on government.
    • Births rates among unmarried mothers have soared in all the largest racial/ethnic groups, whether those groups are minorities or not.  The Federal Government inserted itself in the place of fathers in many of our most economically vulnerable families.
    • Despite spending close to $20,000 per K-12 student, many school districts in places like Detroit, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia still have abysmally low academic performance rates, while schools that spend less than half of that amount have outstanding academic performance.
  • The best innovative solutions to all of these problems and more are best designed, prioritized, funded, and implemented at the state and local levels with our businesses and local nonprofits, churches and community groups playing key roles, accompanied by a renewed emphasis on individual responsibility. These are solutions developed by the people closest to the problems and the people who have those difficulties, not by a Federal Government that has grossly exceeded its legitimate authority and that has such a demonstrated history of failure.
  • States need to be the “laboraties of democracy” in which ideas that are tried and prove workable in one or more states can be voluntarily adopted by other states.
  • Irresponsible spending by states should affect only those in those states. It also tends to be somewhat self-correcting, whereas irresponsible Federal Government spending will crush us all.

 

Constitutional Entrepreneurs also believe in Prioritizing America (as a whole) First.  Promotion of the General Welfare as specified in the Constitution means that the Federal government’s first priority should be the broad interests of US citizens as a whole.  We should not make the interests of US citizens subordinate to the interests of other people from or in other countries. Our Declaration of Independence said that it had become “…necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that tie them to another…”  One people, not all of humanity in the abstract.  The Founders were not trying to free those in Spanish, Portugese or French colonies (or even other English colonies) from the domination of colonial rule, even though they might have opposed that domination.  They were concerned about the duties that they owed to those in what the Declaration refers to as “these Colonies” or “these States,”  those who the Declaration also refers to as “we” and “us”.

Returning to this Constitutional approach does not require reinventing who we are as a country.  But, it will require a Reformation based on rediscovering and a return to following critical parts of the Constitution that we have increasingly ignored and violated to our peril for at least 100 years.

Our Constitution was not a perfect document when it was first written and is not perfect today.  But each generation has owned it and changed it (a total of 27 times).   Undoubtedly, it will be amended again.  However, there is wisdom in our Constitution, even those parts that have been with us from the beginning.  Refocusing on our Constitution can be the basis for a Reformation that will benefit all of us beyond our wildest dreams.

This Reformation will take time to realize.  It won’t happen over night, or even during the next one or two years.  But, if the people and enough national leaders are deeply committed to it, this Reformation can be effectively, efficiently and compassionately implemented for the most part in three to five years.

It’s fashionable in some circles to claim that the Constitution…

• Is seriously flawed and out of date and
• Has no objectively true meaning, that it is a “living document,” meaning that it can be molded like putty to fit the personal and group preferences of government officials, special interest groups, or even “world opinion”.

To the contrary, the US Constitution as amended should be interpreted as we can best determine that those who wrote and amended it meant for it to be interpreted.   If those meanings need to be changed, then we should insist that the Constitution be formally amended.  We should not let judges impose their personal and group preferences, cloaked in the language of Constitutional authority.  We should not let presidents or judges unilaterally decide what parts of the Constitution (or any of our laws) are still applicable or are worthy of enforcement.