The Establishment Paradise (Part Three)

(Note:  This is the third and concluding segment in a three part series.  The first segment traced the evolution of elective office from a noble public service calling to more of an establishment paradise for the ruling class, with ease and plenty far removed from the day to day lives of ordinary citizens.  The second segment identified themes common from Boris Yeltsin's Soviet Union just prior to the collapse of its communist system to Ben Franklin in the early days of the United States.  Franklin, in particular, warned of turning elective office from posts of Honour to places of Profit, with potentially disastrous consequences...)

Is the ownership of Property subject to any substantive limitation under the US Constitution?  Is particular expertise required to hold elective office?  Or can an ordinary citizen learn on the job?  How real is the possibility that the American system of capitalism may experience a similar fate to the now extinct communist economic system under the former Soviet Union?

Mr. Franklin then considered the concept of Property rights.  He reminded the Citizens that these are Our creation, that for a seat at the table of the American Dream, what We have conferred as a Right, We also have the Power to take away:

All Property, indeed, except the Savage’s temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention.  Hence, the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it.  All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition.  He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages.  He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.

The iconic and fiery Andrew Jackson, face on the $20 bill and populist president of the common man, ushered in America’s first age of reform.  Instinctively, so it seems, Jackson understood the perils of the establishment paradise, unchecked.  Jacksonian Democracy reminded ordinary citizens that experience was overrated and that even ordinary, common citizens could learn.  Further, lifetime or long-tenured office-holding often led to inefficiency and even corruption.  The fresh, new blood of the ordinary citizen was required to bring strength, grounded, common sense qualities and the ability to renew the contest.

In May 1829, shortly after Mr. Jackson was inaugurated as the 7^th President of the United States, he elaborated thus:

There has been a great noise … (h)ow every man who has been in office a few years, believes he has a life estate in it, a vested right, & if it has been held 20 years or upwards, not only a vested right, but that it ought to descend to his children, and if no children then the next of kin --- This is not the principles of our government.

President Jackson elaborated:

Office is considered as a species of property, and government rather as a means of promoting individual interests than as an instrument created solely for the service of the people.  Corruption in some and in others a perversion of correct feelings and principles divert government from its legislative ends and make it an engine for the support of the few at the expense of the many.  The duties of all public officers are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance; and I cannot but believe that more is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience. ...

In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.  Offices were not established to give support to particular men at the public expense.  No individual wrong is, therefore, done by removal, since neither appointment to nor continuance in office is matter of right….  It is the people, and they alone, who have a right to complain when a bad officer is substituted for a good one.  He who is removed has the same means of obtaining a living that are enjoyed by the millions who never held office.  The proposed limitation would destroy the idea of property now so generally connected with official station, and although individual distress may be sometimes produced, it would, by promoting that rotation which constitutes a leading principle in the republican creed, give healthful action to the system.

Yet almost 200 years later, amazingly, here we are, with Congressmen locked in to financially lucrative places of Profit.  They hold their offices seemingly ad infinitum, as if owned and fit to be passed down to their children.  The day is long gone where public service is its own reward – it has become institutionalized as the prize.

How will it end?  Will the Princes be dethroned?  Or the People enslaved?  In the end, it comes to little else.

In closing, we return to Boris Yeltsin.  A cynical question came from the floor during his unlikely yet successful 1989 election campaign, as the Soviet Union and its communist economic system convulsed toward extinction:

Tell us what it felt like to live in the “establishment paradise.”  Is it true that the ease and plenty promised in the historical stage of communism has long been the rule “up there?”

Although the US is a vastly different experiment in democracy, is it inconceivable that a similar fate may await the American economic system of capitalism?

-Michael D’Angelo