TAMING THE BUREAUCRATS

If we could stop calling each other names and screaming back and forth, we might realize that the loss of personal power to faceless bureaucracies is the primary motivation behind both the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements. The Tea Party’s rants against the government are largely aimed at large bureaucracies within the government that are more interested in self preservation than serving the people. The Wall Street Occupation is also ranting about our large bureaucratic banks and businesses. The visible 1% consists of the top tier of the bureaucracies. The nature of bureaucracies is towards self preservation rather than creation or adding value. Because relatively few of us can “buy” a congressman, we rely on special interest lobbies to represent us to Congress. With these lobbies now reaching the size of giant bureaucracies themselves, there is little hope of reform for either government or banking as any effective reform will do a lot of damage to the lobbies. In order to return the power to the people, we have to stop delegating our power to our lobbyists and our employers. I would suggest two reforms that would reduce the concentrated power of this “corporate capitalism and government marriage:
1. Have a constitutional amendment that would define “electioneering” and exempt it from the 1st amendment while prohibiting any contributions for electioneering from anyone who could not vote in the election.
2. Eliminate corporate taxation by forcing corporations to pay out all of their annual profits to their shareholders like subchapter S corporations do today.
The first would focus our congressmen’s attention to what is really important to their constituents and eliminate the problem of voting due to money that has no interest in the electoral district. The second would force CEO’s to sell their plans to shareholders in order to raise capital for expansion, rather than explain to shareholders after they have acted. It would eliminate “too big to fail” problems because shareholders are unlikely to fund many of the projects that corporate boards find compelling due to large amounts of cash on their books.