Getting mad at the cursed overlap

Recent polls show that Americas are getting angrier day after day. President Barack Obama recently admitted that the door to the White House was opened to him by the frustration of independent voters. He achieved his success by blaming the financial crisis on the arranged marriage of money and power in the Washington establishment and promising to do something about it. Now he realizes that charm and eloquence may not be enough to propel his party through the midterm elections of 2010. In the absence of any real change in the way that organized special economic interests influence crucial legislation for trillions of dollars, the tide is quickly turning against the government.

Terrorism and healthcare costs, nuclear Iran and North Korea, high unemployment rates, and exploding national debt are scary enough, but it is instructive to note that the most vigorous critics of the current majority's agenda are people concerned for the survival of the fundamental principles of our Constitution. Nothing new under the sun. With the election of Ronald Reagan as the 40th president of the United States, the progressive intellectuals went into hysteria that new legislation and changes in bureaucratic regulation would undermine the Bill of Rights. In a provocative essay titled "Capitalism or Democracy," radical Keynesian economist Robert Lekachman gave voice to the fears of the "progressive" part of America that our Founding Fathers' commitment to political freedom comes in conflict with inequalities produced by the system of free enterprise. "Political and economic markets overlap," wrote Lekachman, "and wealth translates into political influence."

If the American people are serious about preserving their civil liberties, they have only one option. They need to break the cursed cycle of concentration of political power in D.C. that redirects more and more of our resources from their productive uses toward wasteful and disruptive lobbyism. The nation is ripe for a revolution à la 1980. The only missing piece is a good communicator, a statesman who will bring Milton Friedman's message to the voter: "The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. . . . By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power. It enables economic strength to be a check to political power rather than a reinforcement."