Jeff Fink wrote:
Could we say that most of the problems with the US government can be traced to areas where it extends beyond its constitutional limits?
I would go along with that. It is hard to say whether it is "most" or "many" or "some of the most serious" but that surely is a problem.
The other big problem in this administration has been government officials not doing their job, and not enforcing the laws & regulations they are supposed to enforce. Katrina was a prime example, and so is the present market meltdown.
The government has functioned well for 200 years so I am sure it can work. But the present administrators are incompetent and some of them believe that "government is the problem" so they are not motivated to do a good job.
Big government or activist government per se is not at all unconstitutional in my opinion. That is like saying that big corporations are not compatible with democracy. Big or little is not the issue, as long as they are forced to follow the rules and do our bidding.
We should have whatever size of government we need to deal with the situation we happen to be faced with at present. I do not think that present-day technology such as highways, air transportation, the Internet or fossil fuel could exist without a strong activist government. We are still living in the era of large-scale, centralized, standardized, big-iron industrial civilization, although anyone can see that is gradually fading. I would rather have our technology than laissez-faire government. Future technology probably will allow decentralized, weaker government.
As I mentioned, we also need big powerful corporations such as credit card companies. They are a mixed blessing. We need big government to offset the power of these giant corporations. Corporations unchecked by government have a pronounced propensity to steal everything that is not nailed down, as we saw in the Enron episode and today's financial collapse.
We needed big government for WWII and the Cold War and probably to end global warming and deal with some other problems now, but in a few hundred years it may be better to have a small, weak government such as we had before 1860 or in the late 19th century. Nowadays, people know who the president is. From 1890 to the 1920s, every kid in town knew who the mayor and aldermen were, but a lot of them did not know or care who the president was. I expect it will be similar in the future.
- Jed
