Unfortunately, in many ways our constitutional system of government has now become something of a straightjacket where a highly vocal political minority…. any minority…. can very effectively block the efforts of the elected majority and thereby bring the nation to the point where absolutely NOTHING gets done.

Right now, our country is a mess with a crumbling infrastructure, systemic and cultural decay, and huge deficits that only politicians making extremely unpopular choices can effectively address. Yet, so far, all we’ve gotten out of Washington is yet more hot air. Perhaps that’s largely because, under our Constitutional Republic form of government, the elected majority cannot effectively rule because the “checks and balances” in our Constitutional system very effectively prevent it.

I find it interesting that our friends to the north in Canada faced a ballooning debt situation very similar to ours back in the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, their government’s debt was soaring under the socialist “tax and spend” policies of the Trudeau and Maloney eras.

But it took a clear Liberal majority government in the 1990s under the able leadership of Jacques Chretien and Paul Martin to ram through a massive program of sweeping fiscal reforms (which included steep tax increases as well as significant cuts in government spending) all done in an attempt to once again bring the country’s books back into balance.

Needless to say, at the time, those reforms were DEEPLY unpopular with the majority of Canadians. Yet, because Chretien had a clear majority under Canada’s Parliamentary form of government (a system based largely on British Parliamentary rule) he was able to ram through these long-needed reforms and ultimately get the job done.

In short, because there are no systemic “checks and balances” designed to dilute and temper the majority’s rule in the Canadian system, Chretien was able to overcome the strong objections of numerous minorities for the overall long-term good of the country.

The result today is that Canada now has one of the LOWEST debt to income ratios on the planet:

http://www.creditloan.com/blog/2008/10/30/americans-debt-to-income-ratio-as-compared-with-other-countries/.

Their banking system remains one of the strongest on the planet as well. Indeed, two of the 10 strongest private banks in the world are Canadian. And, while Canada DID suffer economic turmoil in the latest economic downturn, what they went through was NOTHING compared to the economic misery the USA has since been going through. And to top it all off, unlike the USA, Standard and Poors has once again rated Canada’s ever-dwindling government debt as AAA.

Andrew Potter, writing in Canada’s Macleans Magazine very effectively discussed these issues in a recent editorial called “The Trouble With Too Much Democracy”.

It’s well worth the read:

http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/08/05/the-trouble-with-too-much-democracy/

Indeed, rather than too many do-nothing politicians, perhaps what we in the USA are REALLY suffering from is “too much democracy”.