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Two cheers for divided government
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(Three for no state at all, of course.)
Question: How can having an anti-liberty president result in more liberty?
Answer: When we finally have an opposition party that's willing to stand up for liberty it helped erode during the years it reveled in unified government.
As Lew Rockwell explains today, divided government is always preferable to a monopoly on power. A snippet:
Back up a bit to try to understand why divided government, even when it is divided among evil people, is better than unified government. Ralph Raico makes the point at every opportunity that the reason that the medieval period gave rise to liberty is that there was no power center on earth. The state was in competition with the Church and a thousand tiny governments were in competition with each other. Power was diffuse, and though any center would have been glad to have it all, the diffusion of power created a kind of gridlock that permitted liberty to grow and thrive.
So too with divided power in any government. They can and do logroll to each other's mutual benefit, but when that process breaks down, it is a glorious thing. Recent history suggests that the logrolling between power centers is least effective when the Republicans are in the minority and the Democrats hold the presidency. The Clinton years are a case in point. Spending rose very little. Warfare was curbed relative to the past and present. Deficits fell. The public sector shrank.
If we're lucky, maybe we'll end up with Clinton II and the GOP, if only because we'll be shackled with a two-party state for the forseeable future, will regain a little of the sanity it shed during its eight-year orgy.
