Bayou Business Review, p. 25, November 1, 1999

This past weekend the voters of Louisiana needed to be speed-readers. Or at least, they had to have done their homework. In a state where basic literacy is low to begin with and where many got through school without doing their homework, it is asking too much of voters to have ten amendments to the constitution on the ballot along with ten or so state and local offices on the ballot. Watch out, on November's ballot there are another six amendments. Worse than having too many amendments to read while in the voting booth is having a constitution that does not function as a constitution.

A constitution is a set of rules for how we are governed. Constitutions delineate the things that are supposed to done by particular levels of government, as well as those things governments are not to do. Without tying the hands of majorities, minorities, whether racial or ideological, can be trampled. Even with constitutional constraints, we see majorities passing tax measures that will be paid for by the few to benefit those in the majority group.

Think of it another way. Governments, organizations created by humans, are given exclusive rights to use force and to imprison citizens. The problem with any government is that once we empower a government to coerce us to pay our taxes and obey laws, it has power over us. Once Dr. Frankenstein created the all-powerful monster, a monster that he could not control, he fell vixtim to the monster's domination.

Democracy may constrain governments some, but only a little. There are so many sensible voting systems that determine winners or winning propositions, and different voting schemes produce different results, different winners, with the same folks voting. For instance, we could have a system where the one with the most votes wins, or we could have a system with the highest two vote-getters face each other in a run-off election. We could also have a system electing a body of X office holders all run in the same election and the top X vote-getters win. Further, we could let those in power decide when the election will be and where the voting places will be and they may decide to let us all know the when and where, or they may decide against telling us all.

Constitutions, then, provide us with clear rules over how things are to be decided. If a constitution is easily amended, as ours seems to be, then the rules are not all that clear. What constrains government today may not tomorrow. This is especially true when few of the final decision makers have time to clearly understand the implications of the multitude of amendments before them. Instead of working within the system of rules, valuable effort is wasted fighting over what the rules are and, as children do in a game, making the rules up as we go along.

In a child's game, making up the rules along the way, often after the fact, results in black eyes, bloody noses and resentment. When it comes to the rules that we are governed by, if we keep making up the rules and changing them back and forth, then the governed have a difficult time knowing what the rules are today and guessing what the rules will be like tomorrow. This was the case with the amendment concerning the Rapides special school district. The best way to avoid getting harmed by frequently changing rules is to not sign up to play in the first place. The bottom line is that investors will not tie their money down in a state where the rules are constantly changing because they are so easy to change.

A constitution ties the hands of government to keep government focused on the things that are better done through government action (there really are a few things governments can do than markets, but not all that many). A constitution also ties the day-to-day decision process in a way that lets folks see some consistency and makes certain things in life a little more predictable. By making the decision-making process hard to change, less work is spent on fighting to change the process and people see that effort is better spent doing something that is really productive.

Louisiana clearly needs a constitutional convention to rewrite the current mess and to make it difficult for the constitution to be changed. There is something ironic in changing the state constitution to make it harder to change.