See the Tea Party’s candidates gleefully inserting earmarks in spending bills.

The solution, of course, is a set of rules, not unlike the Magna Carta or the Constitution. Unfortunately, since you’ve given those in power the power to change (“re-interpret”) the rules, you wind up with all sorts of interesting slippery-slope problems.

I don’t know the answer. It might just be that a civil war every couple hundred years is actually a good thing, to clear out the cruft that builds up otherwise. See wildfires.

There might not be an answer, as long as human beings are in charge.

I don’t know.

Jon