The Only Liberty Amendments We Need

Mark Levin recently came out with a new book called The Liberty Amendments. It's his ideas for the amendments we need to add to the Constitution to restore America to, well, constitutionality.

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds also addresses the idea of amending the Constitution in a USA Today column:

And that gets to what I think is the real problem lying behind all of this enthusiasm for constitutional change: a sense that there are two sets of rules, one for the "insiders" in Washington and their (frequently subsidized, or bailed-out, or protected) corporate allies, and another for everyone else.

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You can address this problem with constitutional amendments, and I think that many are worth considering: The structural shifts in our government have indeed empowered insiders and the expense of the citizenry. But underlying these shifts is a deeper problem of values, one that I doubt can be fixed by passing a few amendments.

I agree with the Instapundit analysis that our problems have more to do with breakdowns in our culture than shortcomings in the Constitution. However, notwithstanding what I'm sure are very smart suggestions from Mark Levin, I think you could do a lot of good for the country by making just two changes:

-- Eliminate tax withholding

Everybody gets their whole paycheck, without deductions for income tax, social security, or whatever. Then, on tax day, everybody has to write a check for their year's tax bill and watch that money actually leave their bank account. I think we would really only have to do this one year. Because once taxpayers saw exactly how much the government was draining out of them, they would burn Washington to the ground.

-- No more thousand-page bills

There are a lot of clever ways you could phrase this--all laws passed by Congress must fit on one side of an 8.5 x 11 printed page; no congressman may sponsor a bill unless he can recite it in its entirety from memory. However you word the limitation, the gist is to eliminate enormous bills that no one has read. It is an absolute joke that in an ostensibly free society the government holds citizens accountable to obey laws whose contents are as hidden and cryptic as the contents of Marcellus Wallace's briefcase.