Three rules for government: a proposition

There should be three basic rules for governments, in addition to existing constitutions. All three are based on common sense.

1. Money should be backed by something, like gold, for instance. Without being backed by something, we rely on the good judgment of politicians to not print money and devalue our money. You can see the obvious problem there. What we have is unbacked "fiat" money. In other words, it is only money because someone decreed it. It is not real money. It is credit. Originally paper money worked because it was simply a note to say, "I don't want to carry around this much gold so I carry this marker instead, since it fits in my wallet nicely." Fiat money is not exchangeable for gold or anything else if people ever decide they aren't confident in it. That is a problem in hard times.

"Holding dollars today represents risk without reward." -- Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize Winning Economist

"By a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. The process engages all of the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner that not one man in a million can diagnose." - John Maynard Keynes, 1920

2. As Milton Friedman opined, "It is just logical that a country can't have illegal immigration and a welfare state." Welfare states are idiotic anyway and doomed to fail, but that is a story for another day. It will be obvious soon enough that the welfare states won't survive. Clearly, if a country is paying out tons of money to the people of the country (money that was taken from them), there can't be unlimited people in the country, especially if they don't pay taxes into the system. That should be as obvious as the idea that I can't have unlimited people in my family if I have committed to taking care of them. There is just no way i could pay for 15 or 30 or 80 "family members" just because they broke into my house. Choose between the luxury of illegal immigration or the luxury of a welfare state.

3. As everyone from Plato to 19th century economists to experts today have said, you can't have both a welfare state and a democracy. You have to choose. The quotes below say it all:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy..." - Alexander Fraser Tytler, Scottish lawyer and writer, 1770

"The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people's money." -- Margaret Thatcher