How to reform institutions

As I begin the laborious process of doing my income taxes, I am again reminded—thanks to withholding and other payments that be made to the ravenous government beast—that I am paying for so many things that aren’t working.

No business could long survive with such a record of failure. Would a car dealer who consistently sells lemons be in business for long? Would a fast-food chain continue to attract customers if the hamburger meat was tainted and customers became ill?

Only the federal government endures with no requirement that it function effectively and efficiently. As Ronald Reagan quipped, “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” He also observed: “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size.”

Six weeks before the 1994 election, Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., published a “Contract with America.” Among other things, it promised voters that Republicans would “select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse.”

Asked about it, Gingrich responded in an email: “We promised to audit the House. We brought in PricewaterhouseCoopers. After a year they reported that they couldn’t audit the House [because] there were no coherent records. We then hired them to build a system that could be audited and since then there has been a transparent audit every year.”

Unfortunately that has not been enough to stem the growth of government under either party.

A Nov. 13, 2000, article by Edward H. Crane, president of the libertarian Cato Institute, said, “… the combined budgets of the 95 major programs that the Contract with America promised to eliminate have increased by 13 percent.”

Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., noted in 2011, “Since taking office President Obama has signed into law spending increases of nearly 25 percent for domestic government agencies—an 84 percent increase when you include the failed stimulus. All of this new government spending was sold as ‘investment.’”

If the Republican presidential candidates want to capture voters’ attention in this turbulent and unpredictable election season, they should compose a new contract with voters. Every federal agency and program either has a charter that established it and/or authorizing legislation in which its purpose is stated. Heads of those agencies should periodically be required to come before Congress and justify, not just their budgets, but their existence. Are they living up to the charter or legislation that created their agency? If not, at least three options present themselves: 1) Downsize the agencies and reduce their budgets to the size commensurate with whatever success they are having; 2) privatize the agencies, or 3) eliminate them.

First, though, we must get beyond the notion of “entitlement” and back to what our ancestors taught about personal responsibility with government as a last resort, not a first resource. That is going to take something akin to a spiritual awakening because government is not about to shrink itself or give up the power it has over the lives of its citizens.

Perhaps a good starting point would be to consult the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson, who Democrats like to claim as the first Democrat. In a letter to Thomas Cooper, dated Nov. 29, 1802, Jefferson wrote, “If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.”

During what has been described as a “revolutionary” campaign season, the revolutionaries might consider promising that if elected they will reduce or eliminate a lot of unnecessary and costly government agencies.

© 2016 Tribune Content Agency LLC.

Listen to Cal Thomas’ commentary on the World and Everything in It.