You folks like to go back to the founders as your rational for limited government. But, you so conveniently forget that it was the founders who discovered that the articles of confederation that were put in place after the revolutionary war simply did not work and were not adequate for the future of the nation.
You folks also conveniently forget that there were checks and balances placed in the original constitution that self limit central government, as well as the ability to amend the constitution so that it might remain relevant for future generations. If any branch of the government has gotten out of control it is the judicial branch who seems to rule by judicial fiat on things from slavery(Dred Scott versus Sandford in 1857 to Roe versus Wade in 1973 to Bush versus Gore in 2000 to Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission in 2010) among others. Although the court has advanced many causes it has also been very influencial in negative ways when it has strayed into the political arena.
As far as the federal government goes, it has helped to end slavery, fought several wars as a collective, advanced human rights through its instigation of enacted laws on civil rights and its inforcement of the same, and mitigated human suffering from FDR forward with its helping hand to the poor and disadvantaged. It has, until recent decades, mitigated the accumulation of vast wealth by a privileged minority by tax policy as well as inheritance laws.
The one thing that the government has not been able to do is to stand against a small, wealthy, misguided and determined minority who wish to, through the use of constantly driving the nation into further and further debt, destroy the effectiveness of that government in the name of simply greed. Of the first ten trillion of national debt, nine trillion of it approximately was run up by conservatove republican presidencies beginnning with Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1981. Progressive tax policy has always been a way to govern for the good of the most people and the right has destroyed that vehicle by falsely getting so many to think that their money is their money even though so many of them, particularly after the end of the draft in the mid 1970's, have done nothing to deserve the right to think that they have that right. President Obama correctly stated in a speech that "you didn't build that. Somebody else did that!" Those who did the building through the fighting of necessary wars and getting through unnecessary depressions are about gone and they have been replaced, to a large extend, by people who did nothing but take advantage of the good that was handed them, and, who want to share that good fortune with as few people as possible. If you do not believe that, it is a simple statistic that the higher the income categoy, the lower the percentage of charitable giving.
If we could get you to believe anything, it would be that the forty seven percent that Mitt Romney talks about will only get larger as time goes on and more and more wealth concentrates in the hands of fewer and fewer people who become more and more isolated from the rest of the herd. And, the saddest part about it all is that the very government who could change all that has been rendered helpless by those who simply believe that it is not necessary at all. Those on the right wish to limit or destroy social safety net programs such as social security while they replace them with things such as private 401K corporate plans that currently have a national average of those participating of around 14,000 dollars per plan participant. How much greed can there be when corporations destroy the very pension plans that enable the older worker to have some dignity and to be able to contribute to the economy that these corporations so depend upon for their survival. And, it is interesting to note that it was the government who enabled these plans by the tax breaks that they gave corporations to participae in them.
There are over three hundred million of us running around here and to think that you can have a larger and larger population with a smaller and smaller government is a recipe for a disaster and that is exactly what we have on our hands! And, the blood of that disaster is on the hands of the new right despite how much they wish to try to spin it in any other way.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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