How much government should we have?
How much government is constitutional?
How much government can we afford?
Obviously, we should have all the government we need — and all that is specifically provided for by the Constitution of the United States.
But we should not have any more government than is constitutional.
We generally maintained that standard until the Great Depression of 1929 and the years that followed. But then, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal sought to overcome our economic distresses by greatly increasing government — and government spending. Some of it was constructive, some of it was wasteful — and much of it was obviously unconstitutional.
But the Great Depression wasn’t completely overcome, and full employment and recovery didn’t really come until our nation beg an to rearm militarily, aided our European allies and entered World War II after being attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
But over many decades, many of the enlarged Depression-era governmental bureaucracies and spending have “hung on” — and expanded.
We now have government doing many things that are not constitutional, and we are financing them with lots of borrowed money.
Where, for just one example, does the Constitution say taxpayers should be required to pay subsidies for farm crops that are priced below a certain level in the marketplace? Nowhere! But we pay farm subsidies.
Where does the Constitution say the federal government should subsidize, and dictate, education? Nowhere! The Constitution leaves education strictly to the states and the people.
There are many other examples of the federal government’s invasion and financing of many things unconstitutionally.
If we obeyed our Constitution of the United States — doing only what it says the federal government should do, and excluding all things not delegated to the federal government — we wouldn’t have federal budget deficits of about $1.5 trillion each year.
We are forcing our people to pay heavy taxes to support many extravagant and unconstitutional government programs. Yet we are adding to our national debt — that already is $12.9 trillion. And we have to pay more than $400 billion in interest on that debt each year.
Can you imagine how much better off our economy would be, and our personal pocketbooks would be, if we permitted Washington to do only what the Constitution provides for it to do, and to spend only what the Constitution prescribes for it to spend?
We’d have less government and a bigger economy, less red ink and more personal prosperity — and more freedom.