Article 3, Section 1 of the Nevada Constitution orders that: "The powers of the Government of the State of Nevada shall be divided into three separate departments -- the Legislative, the Executive and the Judicial; and no persons charged with the exercise of powers properly belonging to one of these departments shall exercise any functions, appertaining to either of the others ..."
As recently as the 1950s, one firm attorney general's opinion after another reminded Nevadans of what this means -- and proved someone was still guarding the hen house: A state employee could not be granted a leave of absence to serve in the Legislature (AGO 357, 12-22-1954) -- he or she had to resign his executive-branch position outright. Nor could a fellow elected by the voters take up his seat in the state assembly unless and until he resigned even so minor an "executive branch" job as that of elementary school janitor (AGO 59,5-9-1955.)
If this section of the state constitution has ever been amended, it's slipped my notice. Yet nowadays, of course (our current attorney general having found better things to do, siding with the federal government against Nevada's miners and ranchers), such arcane, dusty distinctions lie long since abandoned. Representing us in the legislature these days are dozens of "double-dippers" whose daytime jobs find them accepting taxpayer funds in their paychecks as school teachers, university professors, college administrative personnel -- even police officers.
The "day job" of Nevada Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins, for instance, sees him donning the uniform of a Henderson police captain.
Why is this bad? Not because there's anything inherently immoral about police officers, of course. Mr. Perkins is both a decent fellow, and highly smart and competent, or his colleagues would not have elected him to a position of leadership in Carson City.
No, the problem here is more insidious -- having to do with aspects of human nature well recognized by the founders.
The purpose of a "citizen legislature" was to give us lawmakers who -- the majority of the time -- would properly see taxes as a drain on their family resources and their family businesses back home; not a way to beef up the "departmental budget."
The old idea was that the ranchers and miners and merchants and mechanics who traveled to the capital to review our laws on a part-time basis every couple of years would set taxes and excises as low as possible. It was then the job of the handful of executive officers they hired to give us only so much government as those funds would buy.
Gradually, in the 20th century, that process underwent a subtle but unfortunate shift. Now, the "needs" of the permanent government establishment to create ever more "programs" will be added up, and tax rates set to "generate enough revenue to pay those bills."
Bad enough.
But at least until recently, if the citizens worked very, very hard, and the economy resultantly boomed, with the consequence that state revenues exceeded those anticipated by those who set the tax rates, it would still be acknowledged that the tax rates had been set inadvertently too high, and they would be quickly revised downward until the tax man was collecting only the right amount to fund the pre-determined "needs" of the bureaucrats.
But now it appears we're far beyond even that outmoded way of thinking, as we can thank Capt. Perkins for finally making clear.
Following a budget meeting with Gov. Kenny Guinn in Carson City Monday, Speaker Perkins voiced the frustration of some lawmakers with a state budget now showing a $200 million surplus -- $200 million more in taxes having been collected than anyone expected.
If (instead of using conservative revenue estimates) a larger budget had been set up in 1999, those funds wouldn't be merely lying around in an embarrassing manner today, they would already have flowed invisibly into teacher paychecks in a kind of governmental "direct deposit" scheme, Mr. Perkins blustered.
"Instead, we have a big surplus carried over to the next session. People believe that because we have a big surplus, we're in great shape. What the surplus really means, though, is that there are programs we didn't fund."
The statement is astonishing enough to merit a second look. The problem with calling the surplus a "surplus," in Capt. Perkins' view, is that it only encourages taxpayers to think maybe they shouldn't have to keep working two jobs and feeding the kids cold cereal the night before payday in order to continue satisfying these exorbitant government levies; instead perhaps they should get some of that money back. in the form of reduced motor vehicle taxes, lowered sales taxes ... something.
But instead, all this inconvenient heap of greenbacks piling up in Carson City really means, Speaker Perkins now informs us, is that they'll have to do a better job of dreaming up ambitious new erector sets and ant farms at the capital, this time, to soak up these funds in advance, making them disappear before anyone notices.
In No. 47 of "The Federalist Papers," James Madison explained why the separation of powers doctrine must be enforced. "No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty," than the notion of a separation of powers between the branches and levels of government, he wrote.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
We now begin to see the real-life ramifications of Nevada's long-time disregard of these ideas, concerning the accumulation of power in the hands of the few.
A system which allows members of the mandarin class that (start ital)spends(end ital) tax money for a living, to also go to the state capital and decide how much the peasants should pay (start ital)into(end ital) the tax coffers, lacks the checks on authority necessary to protect us from having our "milk quotas" set by a new class of rulers who see themselves having much more in common with the milkers ... than with the milked.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and editor of Financial Privacy Report (subscribe by calling Niles at 952-895-8757.) His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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