Time editorial: The price voters pay with term limits

An editorial in today's New York Times makes the same point I have been making for the past two decades: Term limits are about as undemocratic an idea as we have ever devised.

Certainly Missourians should be able to see the problem by now. We are getting elected officials who spend a great deal of their time amassing money and power and setting up lucrative post-legislative careers as lobbyists or with big business interests. Term limits have shortchanged Missourians and have done the same thing everywhere else they have been tried.

When experienced legislators are put out to pasture, the people who are in charge of the government are the lobbyists and the bureaucrats. As we do it now, just as our legislators have learned the ropes, they are finding they only place they can use that experience is as lobbyists. Certainly this can't be the paradise that those pushing term limits promised us.

The Times editorial sums it up well:

The deceptive charm of term limits is that they automatically purge the system of rascally politicians. But democracy vests that power in every citizen who chooses to vote. Meanwhile, of course, term limits automatically retire excellent public servants whose instincts and experience are not easily replaced. Their future should also rest with the voters.