Will's wise words

Some highlights from a speech given by George Will this past May at a Cato Institute dinner:

I want to thank all of the people in this room for making Cato and its work possible. I also want to thank a few million more people who, in recent weeks, have toiled to demonstrate in a timely manner why Cato is necessary. I refer, of course, to the people of Greece.

...Those of us of the Madisonian persuasion believe that we take our bearings from a certain constancy. Not from -- to coin a phrase -- "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." That phrase, from Justice Warren, has become the standard by which the Constitution is turned into a living document -- a Constitution that no longer can constitute. A constitution has, as Justice Scalia has said, an anti-evolutionary purpose. The very virtue of a constitution is that it's not changeable. It exists to prevent change, to embed certain rights so that they cannot easily be taken away.

...Let's get a sense of the size of our debt. In 1916, in Woodrow Wilson's first term, the richest man in America, John D. Rockefeller, could have written a personal check and retired the national debt. Today, the richest man in America, Bill Gates, could write a personal check for all his worth and not pay two months interest on the national debt. By 2015, debt service will consume about one-quarter of individual income taxes. Ten years from now the three main entitlements -- Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security -- plus interest will consume 93 percent of all federal revenues. Twenty years from now debt service will be the largest item in the federal budget.

...We are going to come to a time when America is going to have to revisit Madison's Federalist Paper no. 45, and his statement, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined." The cost of not facing this fact, of not enforcing the doctrine, in some sense, of enumerated powers, is that big government inevitably breeds bigger government. James Q. Wilson, one of the great social scientists in American history, put it this way. "Once, politics was about only a few things. Today, it is about nearly everything."

...the American people do not mind what they are instructed by their supposed betters to mind, the supposed problem of legislative gridlock. Gridlock is not an American problem, it is an American achievement! When James Madison and 54 other geniuses went to Philadelphia in the sweltering summer of 1787, they did not go there to design an efficient government. That idea would have horrified them. They wanted a safe government, to which end they filled it with blocking mechanisms: three branches of government, two branches of the legislative branch, veto, veto override, supermajorities, and judicial review.

...We are told that one must not be a "Party of No." To "No," I say an emphatic "Yes!" For two reasons. The reason that almost all improvements make matters worse is that most new ideas are false. Second, the most beautiful five words in the English language are the first five words of the First Amendment, "Congress shall make no law." That is: no law abridging Freedom of Speech, no law establishing religion, no law abridging the right to assemble and petition in redress of grievance. The Bill of Rights is a litany of "No's" -- no unreasonable search and seizure, no cruel and unusual punishments, no taking of property without just compensation, and so it goes.

Read the whole thing.