Dear Editor:

As I write I imagine closing off all news sources until I hit send but the news is too compelling. Our country is amidst a constitutional crisis that has been brewing for decades and suddenly is being executed at lightning speed.

The present battle is over who decides how the currency created by our government is distributed into society. Will it be by Congress or by Elon Musk? It is the ultimate head-on confrontation of government by public-private relationships Who is the top dog? Government for the people or government by private interests? While Trump is defunding our constitutional government, Musk is capitalizing a replacement government, seemingly with his private wealth, which has grown enormous with a lot of help from federal contracts and state subsidies.

The economy creates wealth through productivity and needs a system to facilitate exchange. The system is the currency printed by the federal government. How, why, and to whom is currency distributed? Is the government’s role to manage the distribution of currency equitably or is it to manage the economy?

The system Musk and Trump are defunding was first established by federal law: the United States Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968, Public Law 90–577i, which outlines the system of wealth distribution from the federal government to the local unit of government.

We can plan changes within the system as incremental transformations toward a defined goal, as did the Biden administration’s philosophical reorientation from a trickle-down to a bottom-up, middle-out economy or we can take a hatchet to the entire system and transfer its wealth to private corporations, as Elon Musk is attempting.

When the government is deconstructed from the top down, all that is left is local power. Whether it can also be a middle-out economy is up to us. Muskrump and the tech oligarchs have the top-down covered and are targeting control over government-printed currency, but when the government is defunded from the top, fragments fall to the ground and become new seeds. What an odd way to restore constitutional Home Rule. Are we ready?

Susan M. Andersen

Boothbay Harbor