Published: November 10, 2008 11:03 am            

Tar Heel Dispatch – Boiling water

Both John McCain and Barack Obama have promised to do just about everything under the sun.

You don’t hear either one saying anything about limiting the power of the federal government.

Politicians assume that every problem has a federal government solution.

But everything doesn’t have to be a federal issue.

Too often we forget that we have state governments that can handle problems better than any one-size-fits-all federal approach. We’ve also lost any concept of limited government.

Both parties are guilty of increasing government beyond its constitutional limits. Republicans in Washington learned to spend like Democrats; Democrats promise to spend like socialists.

And the federal government is extended to all facets of our lives: the Wall Street bailouts, business regulations, television and radio programming regulations, agricultural quotas, environmental regulations, social engineering, etc.

The Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution clearly and expressly enumerates the limited powers of the federal government:

To borrow money, regulate foreign and interstate commerce, naturalization, and bankruptcy, to coin money, fix weights and measurement standards, build post roads, issue patents, establish federal courts, define and punish piracy, declare war, to provide for an army and navy and militias.

All other powers not enumerated are reserved to the states and the people, according to the 9th and 10th amendments.

So how did Big Brother get so big – now on the verge of implementing plank 5 of the Communist Manifesto, nationalizing of our banks?

It didn’t happen overnight. For over a hundred years the commerce clause has been exploited by Congress and the Supreme Court to justify all sorts of “necessary” government growth.

But is it really necessary for the federal government to grow like this?

It doesn’t make much sense to send our tax dollars to Washington to be laundered and pilfered by bureaucrats only to have a fraction of what we sent filtered back to our state to do things we could have done more efficiently and effectively in the first place.

Whether it is education, healthcare, drug enforcement, minimum wage, or anything else, states can address these issues without Big Brother’s help. Federal solutions make little sense, anyway.

Why not keep our education tax dollars in the state and target North Carolina’s dropout crises directly with North Carolina solutions?

Why do we nationally uniform federal drug laws?

We don’t have uniform murder, rape, theft laws. What good is a national minimum wage what is higher than the market value of labor in some states, but too low in others?

Now we have two presidential candidates that are largely indistinguishable – big government solution oriented.

Obama isn’t against international military intervention; he just wants to do it smarter and in places besides Iraq.

McCain isn’t against national healthcare; he just wants to use $5,000 government handouts to finance it as opposed to Obama’s government mandates.

The biggest difference between the two is on taxes. Obama will tax “Joe the Plumber,” redistribute the wealth, allow the Bush tax cuts to expire and raise taxes on job creating businesses.

McCain offers true tax cuts to taxpayers, not welfare “stimulus” checks sent to non-taxpayers.

But neither proposes significant spending cuts, so just add this stimulus onto the massive $10 trillion national debt.

Both candidates supported the largest expansion of corporate welfare in history in the Wall Street bailouts.

And now McCain wants the Fed to directly buy bad mortgages, a socialistic idea borrowed directly from FDR’s New Deal, which even Obama has been critical.

In fairness, we are to blame, too. How could a politician who wants to do less, not more, get elected in this political climate?

We the people increasingly look to the government to do something about everything. As a result, both parties have become defenders of big government ideologies.

It is a slow, imperceptible process. It probably happened without our even noticing it. But it seems that the public has become increasingly comfortable with policies that are quite frankly socialism by another name. And perhaps it is inevitable.

Thomas Jefferson said, “It is the natural course of things for government to increase and liberty to yield.”

That quote reminds me of economist Walter Williams’ frog analogy. He says if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, he’ll instinctively jump right out.

If you put him in a pot of cool water and slowly turn up the heat to a boil, by the time he realizes he’s cooking, it’s too late for him to jump out.

The good news is that if McCain is elected, we might get lower taxes and some decent judges on the Supreme Court.

If Obama is elected, we may finally realize the water is starting to boil before it’s too late.



Tar Heel Dispatch is written by Tyler Younts, a first-year law student at Campbell University. Younts, who grew up in Farmer, has a passion for writing and for politics and for writing about politics. E-mail comments to news@randolphguide.com or directly to Younts at younts@email.unc.edu

        

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