Get your free loot!

Unlike a lot of what Washington does these days, the decennial census is actually authorized in the Constitution.

What's authorized is for the American people to be counted. And we should indeed tell the federal government how many people live in each domicile. The Constitution is helpful even here, explaining that there are two legitimate reasons why the central government needs this information: 1) to allocate seats in the House of Representatives, so that each district contains approximately the same number of people, and 2) for apportionment of direct taxes -- the kind that aren't indirect excises, the kind in which assessments are sent to the states, whereupon each resident is to be assessed the same amount.

Yet read or listen to the advertisements with which the Census Bureau now endeavors to cajole Americans to "send in their forms." According to the bureau, it's all about getting a "fair share" of the loot being doled out by Washington.

That's wrong.

Should Illinois and Ohio get more Navy bases because they have more people than tiny New Hampshire or Connecticut? They don't and they shouldn't. Naval bases -- which, unlike federal aid to education and agriculture, are authorized by the Constitution -- go where the Navy needs them, not where the most hungry mouths cry out for federal sustenance and "jobs programs."

Was a mint constructed in Carson City -- back when we were still governed by the Constitution -- because Nevada had a bigger population than, say, Michigan? Of course not. They built the mint where the silver was.

The federal government is supposed to perform its limited functions, equally benefiting all Americans, primarily in Washington. It was never intended to be Pharaoh, gathering in the harvest of the nation, and then doling out sustenance as it saw fit, in ways designed to benefit the political class.

Advising us to fill out and send in our forms so that -- like members of a pirate crew -- we're assured of receiving our "fair share of the plunder" is insulting, demeaning and likely to prove counterproductive.

We would prefer the chief pirates on the Potomac simply leave the loot with its rightful owners in the first place.