Let me get this straight. You consider everything the country needs and what its resources are and you and your colleagues in Congress study the problem as hard as you can, taking in the latest constraints and opportunities, and you make a judgment about the budget. Then you have to submit to the judgment of earlier Congressmen who had no way of knowing what the country would need, and couldn't study the problem, and had only the vaguest expectation of what the constraints and opportunities now are. This limit on the national debt represents their judgment, right?
Right. And you voted for those Congressmen. They are your representatives in a democracy.
They were my representatives. The one up there now is my representative and, since this is a democracy, I want him to do my will. If he's held to this debt limit he's prevented from doing my will. You know what I call people who prevent my elected representatives from doing my will? Tyrants.
Ah yes, but if your Congressman is not held to this limit he may spend more money than you, if you knew the future, would want him to. You may find that he is not doing your will, your best will.
In that case I will vote him out of office. I can't vote a debt ceiling out of office. Yet it comes in and removes the people I have most recently voted for out of office. It won't let them work for me. Why?
Because it (if it had a mind) thinks they won't work wisely.
That's possible. The other possibility is that they didn't want to do the work themselves. It was too hard. But they wanted to look like workers, people who rolled up their sleeves and got tough with spending. So they put in a strict debt limit. "See, we're really tough." Only later, after the election, now, would it become clear that somebody else would have to really, rather than symbolically, get tough.
That says it all.
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