“According to respected polls,” Ira Shapiro writes at The Hill, “public approval of the Supreme Court has dropped precipitously to the lowest level in the 50 years that it has been measured.”

And not, he cautions, not just to recent revelations concerning the less than ethical (those are my polite words for “bribe-accepting”) behavior on the part of at least two, and likely more, justices, but because “America has found itself in the grip of an extreme court majority, which shows no respect for the law, precedent, constitutional rights and personal freedom, or the other branches of government.”

Personally, I find the current Court a mixed bag on all the metrics Shapiro mentions, but even assuming that it’s really as awful as he believes it is, his proposed solution — term limits, with Chief Justice John Roberts setting the example by retiring now, after 18 years — doesn’t seem likely to fix either the “corruption problem” or the “extremism problem.”

Usually when I argue with my libertarian friends who support term limits, the same rosy predictions abound — it will end political careerism, reduce the time corrupt officials have to monetize their offices, and encourage “citizen legislators” (or, in this case, judges) whose incentives will tend toward “do a good job, then return to private life.”

I don’t have anything AGAINST term limits, mind you, but they’re no panacea. We’ve had time to see how term limits work at the state level, and they work like this:

A politician maxes out his or her terms in a particular office, then runs for a higher office while working to get a spouse or child or protege installed in the office being vacated. Instead of an “in then out” set of doorways, it becomes an “in then up, dragging a crony onto the now-empty lower step” escalator.

Far from discouraging corruption as such, term limits simply encourage a more carefully planned version of the already familiar phenomenon of building political “machines” and “dynasties.” Does the name “Kennedy” ring any bells? How about “Bush?”

And even assuming that an elected or appointed official doesn’t game the system that way, the incentive for corruption doesn’t disappear. It simply becomes a matter of making hay while the sun shines — knocking down the biggest bribes possible in the shortest time possible instead of counting on decades in which to amass a fortune.

Might term limits help at the margins, encouraging “citizen politicians” and “respected jurists” to engage in “public service” as an interlude rather than a career? Maybe, but so far performance versus that expectation seems very spotty.

The problem with “limiting” political power in any way is that those who seek such power will always find ways around the limits.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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The collapses of three large US banks (Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank) so far this year has certainly caught the attention of  Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. On June 29, Fed chair  said at a conference (without going into detail) that the failures “suggest a need to strengthen our supervision and regulation of institutions of the size of SVB.”

In reality, “supervision and regulation” — including the FDIC’s guarantee to make depositors whole should a bank fail — have proven themselves part of, not a solution to, the problem. As regulators jigger with the rules (and break those rules, as FDIC did in paying out more than the insured limits to SVB’s depositors),  creative bankers work the angles in what amounts to an outrageously large casino operation.

The problem is something called “fractional reserve banking.”

When you deposit, say, $100 in a bank, the understanding is that you can withdraw the full $100 at any time.

But your bank doesn’t stick the $100 in a vault so that that it can hand it back to you on demand. Under the Fed’s “capital requirement” rules, somewhere between 90% and 93% of that money (depending on the bank’s size) gets loaned out, invested in bonds, etc. so that the bank makes money from your money.

Suppose some of those investments go underwater — borrowers default, bond interest rates fall. Or maybe the investments just aren’t very liquid — they can be turned into ready cash, but not quickly.

Now suppose you show up at the bank to collect your $100, and all the bank’s other customers are there too, queuing up to close out their accounts (maybe all of you heard the bank wasn’t doing well).

There are a thousand of you standing in line, with an average balance of $100, to make a nice even $100,000 being withdrawn. This is called a “bank run.”

But the bank only has $10,000 on hand and can’t readily lay hands on the other $90,000 it owes all of you.

At some point, the bank closes its doors and goes bankrupt (or sells itself to an institution with deeper pockets for a fraction of its assets’ prospective value). The bank has failed.

Sure, the FDIC will give you your $100 back, taking it out of “insurance premiums” paid by all banks (which is to say, by all banks’ customers).

But what if instead of three banks, it’s 300 banks or even 3,000 banks. Things could get very bad very quickly. Widespread panic at least, and maybe even full-on economic collapse.

Instead of “capital requirement” rules and “insurance” schemes to make fractional reserve banking “work,” we need banks that keep 100% of their deposits on hand instead of loaning or investing those deposits, taking their profits in fees for processing checks and debit card transactions.

Six states already provide for the chartering of “100% reserve” banks, but the Fed is resistant to the idea. And no wonder — in this casino operation, they’re ultimately the house, which always wins. The banks are the gamblers … and they’re gambling with your money.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Three of Donald Trump’s rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination,” Jeff Stein reports at the Washington Post, “are pushing for cuts to Social Security benefits that would only affect younger Americans.”

With the first Republican primary debate approaching,  the nomination contest is a two-way race between former president Donald Trump (far ahead) and everyone else (far behind). It’s Big Idea time in that trailing pack, with every candidate casting about for some kind of policy proposal that might help him or her close the distance.

Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, and Nikki Haley aren’t really doing Big Idea Time stuff here. A Big Idea needs to be unique to a candidate. Three people saying the same thing (keep the checks coming to retirees, promise younger people fewer future benefits) isn’t a Big Idea. It’s the collective moan of runners who are out of breath and limping.

The last Big Idea on Social Security came in 2016 from Chris Christie. It didn’t help him because no one was really listening to anyone but Donald Trump, but at least it seemed actuarially sound from the standpoint of “saving” Social Security. Raise the retirement age by one week per year, he said, so that nobody’s retirement age gets pushed WAY back; and means-test benefits such that people don’t get benefit checks while still earning more than $200,000 per year.

“Keep those checks coming to old people and tell young people they’re gonna get screwed” is not only not a Big Idea, it’s pretty much electoral suicide. Yes, older people vote at higher rates than younger people, but throwing either group under the bus is a great way to get dragged under that bus with and by them.

For the original Big Idea on Social Security, let’s consult the program’s founding father, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“It is proposed,” FDR wrote in a 1935 message to Congress, “that the Federal Government assume one-half of the cost of the old-age pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.”

Social Security should, per FDR,  have served a short-term purpose then disappeared as personal, private sector retirement accounts took its place.

Instead, Congress spent all the money it took in Social Security taxes and then some, financing benefits for retirees with the taxes paid by younger workers, even as the former population grew faster than the latter. We have a name for that practice: “Ponzi Scheme.” Like all Ponzi Schemes, Social Security will, at some point, collapse into bankruptcy.

Nor, whatever you may have been led to believe, are you “owed” benefits. “The noncontractual interest of an employee covered by the Act,” the Supreme Court ruled in Flemming v. Nestor (1960), “cannot be soundly analogized to that of the holder of an annuity, whose right to benefits are based on his contractual premium payments.” In short, there’s no actual government IOU to U.

Any truly Big Idea on Social Security will necessarily involve winding it down and closing it out with the minimum possible damage to its victims.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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