There is a case to be made for going much further to return the federal government to what the Founders intended, to pare it once more back to its proper constitutional boundaries. This will go beyond trimming the fat; it will involve cutting the imperial colossus our federal government has become down to the bone and then paring away some of the bone to boot.

In this ninth and final installment, let's talk about the path forward. Where do we go from here?

In 1712, Joseph Addison penned the work "Cato, A Tragedy in Five Acts," which describes the last years of Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis. Cato the Younger has been described as "Rome's last citizen" (see the excellent Rob Goodman/Jimmy Soni work by that title - I can't recommend you read it strongly enough). One of my personal heroes, Cato stood in front of the oncoming totalitarian express train that was Caesar and shouted, "Stop!" 

He lost. After the second Roman Civil War ended with Julius Caesar seated as dictator-for-life, Cato cut out his stomach and died.

While by all accounts Cato was an unpleasant man in person - quick to anger, irascible, stubborn, and inflexible - he was also widely known as incorruptible. In an era when political corruption and bribery were now only widely practiced but generally considered routine, Cato was immune to bribery. His philosophy of Stoicism was stern and inflexible as well; even though he sprang from Rome's nobility, he wore only plain unadorned robes and even eschewed shoes.

He was a man committed to republican principles. In Rome's populist rush to embrace Caesar, he fought to preserve those principles. He lost. He died. So did the republic. Republican government was effectively dead in the civilized world and would not rise again until 1776, half a world away, when a small group of rebels declared their independence from the world's greatest empire.

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We sit here now in the 249^th year of the great American republic, and we face many of the same crises that confronted Cato, and some he never imagined.

• Our federal government has mortgaged our grandchildren's futures and continues to drive the public debt ever higher. There are apparently no longer any limits or even any lip service to fiscal sanity.
• Our government has grown as corrupt as the late Roman Republic. Our federal government has, in recent years, allowed arms to cross the border into the hands of criminal cartels and abandoned advanced weaponry and equipment to terrorists. They have dithered while embassies in foreign countries are burned and ambassadors are murdered; they pass out taxpayer dollars by the billions to political cronies to finance failed business experiments (see: Solyndra).
• Our courts can no longer be relied upon to arbitrate the Constitution (see: Kelo vs. New London).
• Too many of our citizens no longer see themselves as Americans first. Instead, they divide themselves by wholly arbitrary lines: Skin color, ethnicity, and political party. Of these, the first is certainly the most irrational, but in the last few years, tension along the line of melanin content seems to have exploded, stoked by a professional and profitable grievance industry (see: Al Sharpton).

Born in 1961, I am among the last of the Baby Boomers, a child of the '60s and '70s who came of age during the Reagan boom of the '80s. I remember very well the economic malaise of the Nixon-Ford-Carter years, and due to a lot of reading, I have some understanding of the causes of that terrible period and more to the point, how we rose out of it - and why, during the Obama years and, later, during Biden administration, we began to slide back into the economic morass of that time.

It seems strange to contemplate the idea that my parents (born 1923 and 1928) in their lifetimes probably saw America's best years. They were after all children of the Great Depression and young adults during the Second World War. But they also lived through the great American expansion of economic power and influence that rose after World War 2 and continued, with some minor ups and downs, until about 2007.

My grandparents (born 1894, 1894, 1898 and 1901) saw America's expansion from a mostly agricultural, continental nation to a world power. They saw both World Wars and the rise of America as a global nation. My paternal grandfather spoke with great pride of his Army service in the First World War and described his vivid memory of the first airplane he ever saw, a barnstorming biplane that overflew the small farm where he lived as a young man.

My children (born in 1982, 1992, 1996, and 1997) have seen the rise of the Internet. They were born just prior to the dot-com boom and bust of 2000 and now are in their adulthoods and raising families in the days of routine double-digit unemployment, anemic economic growth and slowly increasing inflation. The younger two are nearing thirty and cannot afford to buy a house, even in their non-conventional three-member household; that part of the American Dream has been denied them.

What will my grandchildren (six of them, so far born from 2003 to 2021) see in their lifetimes? More runaway spending? More debt? More inflation? A spiral of ever-more-intrusive government? The collapse of our republic? An American Caesar?

The Roman Republic fell when one man, with an army at his back, looked at the republic and saw a doddering old system that, he thought, had grown too corrupt to continue. The solution proved worse than the disease, as it destroyed the republic and gave Rome an empire - that is to say, a totalitarian monarchy that barely paid lip service to republican principles in the name of the Senate. There is, at present, no Caesar in America; there is no political leader with the strength to seize total power. The imaginings of conspiracy theorists aside, Joe Biden was no Caesar; he is not a strong man, he is not a self-disciplined man, and to be perfectly honest I do not see him as a particularly intelligent man. And he certainly was no Cato; he is, for one thing, deeply and fundamentally corrupt.

However, while there is no Caesar, we may well have a Cato. We have a leader, one who is willing to stand in front of history and shout, “STOP!” He, like Cato, is an imperfect man, and who among us is perfect? Donald Trump can be prickly; he is mercurial, he is impulsive, he does not suffer slights, nor does he tolerate foolishness. But he is also the right man for the moment. He has recognized what professional politicians cannot: that the American people are tired of the way things are and want a return to American values and American prosperity.

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But there remains that one nagging problem.

Read: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII

We are lost in a forest of uncertainty, headed towards the edge of a fiscal cliff that our political leadership seems determined to take us over. President Trump has empowered the Department of Government Efficiency to identify wasteful spending, but I’m afraid it won’t be enough. We must cut spending. Not decrease the rate of increase; cut spending in absolute terms. We need to use not a scalpel but a chainsaw. The federal government, to address this fiscal crisis, must be brought back to within its constitutional guidelines to what it was in about 1850. Like Barry Goldwater, I am not so interested in making government more efficient; I mean to make it smaller. That latter will by necessity lead to the former.

The chances of anything like this actually coming to pass, I'm afraid, are slight. I think there will be a major economic and political collapse first. And when republics collapse, they generally are not replaced by republics. We can read about Rome, but as a people, we don't seem to have learned from it.