Chris Berry On The Net

There are few things that lawmakers look forward to more than a good crisis. Under ordinary circumstance, voters tend to be very skeptical of any attempt by legislators to pass sweeping reforms. When those same voters are confronted with the prospect of a looming crisis, however, our elected representatives take full advantage of the situation by playing on their fears.

From the lawmakers’ perspective, a crisis represents the same opportunity for mischief whether it is real or imagined. The media is often complicit in turning a one-time event into a perceived crisis for the sake of promoting their own agenda. When a real problem does exist, the severity is often blown out of proportion to persuade voters to accept legislation that would be intolerable under less drastic circumstances. Have you noticed that Mr. Obama’s pronouncements on the economy have been getting progressively bleaker of late?

If we look at the history of legislation passed in the name of averting some crisis or another, it’s clear that the laws often did nothing to solve the problem, and that there were significant unintended consequences resulting from the hastily conceived plans. The recently passed Troubled Asset Relief Program is a perfect example. Others from recent memory include the Patriot Act, and the notorious 55 mile per hour speed limit.

While bad legislation is often crafted in response to a particular crisis, it is also common for unrelated pet projects to be cleverly re-packaged as solutions to the problem. The original Social Security Act of 1935 is a perfect example. At the time, Roosevelt himself predicted the system would collapse under its own weight by 1980. In the depths of the Great Depression, however, he was able to pass it off as a means of reducing unemployment by providing retirement income for older workers.

Roosevelt knew that the law would have no impact on unemployment, particularly since there were five years between the passage of the act and the time the first benefits were paid. He also knew that without the crisis presented by the Depression, the likelihood of passage would have been slim. In fact, one of his greatest fears during the mid-1930’s was that the Depression would end too quickly and provide future lawmakers the opportunity to dismantle many of his New Deal programs. Unfortunately that did not happen, and today we are saddled with the greatest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world.

Today, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are in the process of writing an economic stimulus bill that is likely to cost $1 trillion. To put this in perspective, that is the equivalent of roughly 11 months worth of federal income tax receipts. It remains doubtful whether it will do anything to actually stimulate the economy in the short-term, but there is no doubt that it will be crammed full of pet projects cleverly repackaged as solutions to the problem. We probably can’t do anything to stop the ultimate passage of the bill, but we must do our best as citizens and voters to ensure that it does not contain new entitlement programs that will ultimately result in a new and more severe crisis than what we face today.