Do-Good Federal Programs Are Socialist and Unconstitutional
“In questions of power … let no more be heard of confidence in man but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” – Thomas Jefferson
The purpose of our Federal Government, as found in the Preamble of the Constitution, is to “establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
The Preamble states that an overriding purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to “promote the general welfare,” indicating that issues such as poverty, housing, food and other economic and social welfare issues facing the citizenry were of central concern to the framers.
Quoting KrisAnne Hall in her ‘The Proper Role of Government? They Don’t Have a Clue!’ “‘James Madison, the Father of the Constitution and fourth President, said: ‘The powers delegated to the federal government are few and defined.’ He lists them as war, peace, negotiations, and foreign commerce. He explains that the general welfare clause does not grant the government the power to do generally whatever they want; it simply describes the purpose in delegating those few powers he listed. In other words, our founders believed in and intended limited government, very limited.
“‘I, sir, have always conceived—I believe those who proposed the Constitution conceived—it is still more fully known and more material to observe, that those who ratified the Constitution conceived—that it is not an indefinite government…but a limited Government. The Powers delegated to the federal government are few and defined…war, peace negotiations, and foreign commerce.’ – James Madison”
America’s Constitution was founded on the principles of true freedom meaning that our freedom is God-given and we are free to pursue our ambitions. That freedom rewards initiative, hard work and perseverance. Free Americans know how to create, build, survive and grow. Compulsive politicians need to restrain themselves from their longing for power and their insatiable desire to satisfy pet interests that burden us. They’ve been preying on uniformed voters for too long.
These program and regulation creating bureaucrats need rightfully being regulated by us at the ballot box, as most certainly their program and regulation creating bureaus and agencies need abolishing. The late French President Charles de Gaulle once said, “I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.” – Sounds strange having come from him but certainly fitting for America today.
One could fill an encyclopedia with what has gone wrong with our system, our course, our decline in morality and factual historical education, the focused socialist agenda of education, trashing of our religious principles, the rise in naiveté and corruption in government, and the travesty of our sorry media lackeys intentionally, politically mis-reporting and not reporting or investigating serious government abuses and scandals.
OVERVIEW OF AMERICA
Some of the best words ever written explaining what America is about are from Jack F. McManus in ‘Overview of America,’ the best 29-minute video you will ever watch about America:
“More and more people are coming to realize that they may prosper materially only for a time because their freedoms are diminishing. The sobering reality is that America has been led far from its praiseworthy beginnings. Our people and businesses have grown under the heavy burden of economic, political and social problems which are the result of a departure from the fundamental truths that have made our nation great.
If the United States of America is to endure, citizens far and wide, must once again come to understand, embrace and live like timeless concepts. Concepts called Americanism.
What made America great and set us apart from other lands? Was it natural resources? No. Other lands are equally blessed. Was it the people? No. The people who built America came from elsewhere. Was it government planning and wisdom that spurred our nation to such heights? No again. It wasn’t what America did that made America great, it was what government was prevented from doing that made the difference.
What set America apart from other lands was freedom for the individual, freedom to work, to produce, succeed and especially to keep the fruits of one’s labors. America became great precisely because a stifling effect of too much government had been prevented.
However, freedom in America was not totally unrestrained, Americans overwhelmingly chose to limit their actions with moral codes such as the 10 Commandments, personal morality and limited government. It’s a combination that characterized America and made it the envy of the world.
When our founding fathers decided it had enough of British oppression they broke away and declared independence. They stated as self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence ‘that men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. In other words, God gave man his rights, and that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And in a very next sentence the founders define the proper role of government when they stated that to secure these rights governments are instituted. This is the entire philosophical base of our nation.
Here the government cannot legitimately redistribute the wealth, assume power over the people’s lives and dominate peoples’ lives with excessive taxation, regulations and controls. According to the founders government was to be a negative force, which leaves people alone. Its sole function is to protect citizens from one another and foreign governments and especially from their own government itself. The founders did not create government to be a positive force to do things for people, to take from some to give to others. They understood that when the government starts doing things for one citizen it has to take from another to do so. And in the process, it takes control over both.”
– Unquote Jack McManus, President Emeritus, The John Birch Society
WHAT’S WRONG WITH GOVERNMENT TODAY
All government programs and freebies are always paid for, not by some ‘magic’ in the U.S. government but by citizens’ taxes. Government can do nothing without the money we taxpayers send it! It all starts with the rewards of free enterprise, productivity, and a thing called profit in our wonderful captialist system. However, and maybe I should say, unfortunately, government can borrow, can’t it?
The reason our federal government is $31 trillion dollars in debt is it hasn’t been following our Constitution. Civil war would probably ensue if taxpayers were held to pay as the government spends our money. We don’t have a budget problem; we have a spending problem for ‘do-good’ and blatant special interest programs that are un-Constitutional.
All the goodies a government can dole out for votes, power and money are becoming entirely too expensive for citizens to endure. John Larabell points out the high costs of single payer ‘government’ health insurance and many more government programs in Scandinavia, in his 2016 article ‘Scandinavia, Successful Socialism?’:
”So what’s the total tax burden for a person earning what, in America, would be a typical middle-class income? When considering income taxes, VAT, social security, and other taxes — such as the tax of up to 180 percent on gasoline-powered automobiles in Denmark (!) — many Scandinavians effectively give between 70 and 80 percent of their income to the government. So, the moniker of ‘highest taxed people on Earth’ is not an exaggeration.”
So why do we tolerate our representatives (they do work for us, and it is our government) running and ruining America with their endless efforts to pursue power and help special interests (usually called their constituencies) when the result is an unfair competitive subsidy, bailout, guarantee or outright funding freebie. This government ‘help’ always sold as ‘well intentioned’ usually unbalances a perfectly good market with unfair advantages, such as exclusivity, fixed bidding or market control?
Issues like necessary national security, shared regional state water distribution, interstate highway, and national airport developments etc. notwithstanding, most local, and regional issues of any substantial consequence can generally attract private investment and if not, it probably isn’t viable and certainly should not be ‘subsidized by our collective tax trough.’ Prime unnecessary, subsidized examples are the ethanol, solar, windmill subsidies and GM bailout fiasco (GM still owes us $10 billion, refuses to pay it back and now has moved plants to China and Mexico) and (Solyndra stiffed us for over $500 million and then went bust).
Subsidized companies’ return on investment would not attract many investors without subsidies. Politicians who are responsible for getting our money for their ‘projects’ are handsomely rewarded with quid pro quo contributions either directly or indirectly. Some say that is how our system works. I’m saying that is how we have been going backwards for too long. Our trough has been empty for a long time. Putting newly printed ‘play’ money in the trough is inflationary and our debt is beyond insanity.
No matter how puritanical a ‘bring home the bacon’ pitch sounds it really is a request by politicians to directly enlist political support for themselves and they love being the hero for grab bagging our collective money home, probably with almost the same pride as Robin Hood.
STATES RIGHTS’ TRUMP THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
America is supposed to be all about the states. Again, quoting McManus, “The central government was created with strictly limited powers leaving the states to compete with one another to become the best state, the one with the least amount of taxation and controls, one where citizens would want to build a business and raise a family. That spirit of competition produced excellence as honest competition always does.”
Our precious documents, the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights made us a nation of laws that have guided us through much tribulation to become the most successful nation in history, the envy of the world. To call our Constitution outdated is absolute tripe promoted by those who would take us down or those who are deluded.
The more we get from government the more closely we are to living in socialism where our freedoms and enterprises are slowly strangulated. It is time for the states to discover the 10th Amendment and start the process of Nullification.
States Bob Adelmann of the New American.com,
“The one thing that would work best at reducing government: following the limitations placed on the federal government by the Constitution. Under Article 8, the duties have been enumerated, limited, and then guaranteed under the 10th Amendment: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ Just following the Constitution would, it has been estimated, cut the government by at least 80 percent.”
Think of the good that money could do working in the private sector.
Former government employees would evolve into vibrant jobs in the expanding commerce of the healthier private sector and be just fine. As Americans, the good ones will appreciate their new freedoms and the whiners will have to attend to some growing up. America isn’t about guarantees. It is about the freedom to grow and succeed and learning valuable lessons that can be built upon when attaining less.
WHAT CITIZENS MUST DO TO RESTORE AMERICA?
We put our elected representatives on notice that we expect them to do the hard work of developing a grand plan that can work to turn things around by returning us to a functioning Republic following our laws and the Constitution before we go away to turn into a member state of a global government run by unelected, unaccountable global power elitists who know best about everything for everybody.
There will be much gnashing of teeth, screaming and whispering threats from lobbyist and many special interests’ PAC’s. But that must be expected, if we are to really get us back to where we should be. THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH POLITICAL PARTIES! Both parties are full of socialist leaning members. It has everything to do with patriotism, because we as Americans are supposed to care about and run our country. Not political PAC’s, or the Council on Foreign Relations, the corrupt UN and especially not George Soros and his ilk.
Americans must make certain that we continually watch voting records published on both houses of congress here in Idaho at idahofreedom.org and the U.S. congress, published quarterly, at thenewamerican.com while making sure our representatives know we are watching their voting record. And we must awaken others to the importance of this monitoring and how to do it.
See: America: What We Are About and A Nation of Coddled Fools?