| | Jules, I am not aware of any time in history when government was not expanding. It is true that the national debt was paid off in the 1820s. However, if you consider the long tradition from the Alien and Sedition Acts, through the Black Laws, the Bureau of Indian Affairs... Consider even the Coast Guard. It sounds like they guard the coasts. But that's the Navy's job. The Coast Guard is a revenue service: tax enforcers. You know about the Whiskey Rebellion, of course, but the big jump to kerosene happened when an additional tax was placed on alcohol during the Civil War.
During World War I, the government nationalized the railroads, and the freight forwarders; and also seized all radios both receivers and transmitters. After the war, they created the Railway Express Agency and the Radio Corporation of America. The 10-cent dime coin of 1916-1945 has a fasces on the reverse. That was not an accident.
When Ayn Rand testified in front of Congress, her points were lost or not addressed. It was not the business of the government to investigate screen writers. The McCarthy Era was the second red scare. In 1920, properly elected legislators in New York were denied their seats simply for being Socialists. In my parents' high school which was my high school, one of the social studies teachers called to question a racist newspaper column about "the dirty yellow hides of the Japanese." He lost his job as a social studies teacher and was taught gym for the rest of his career. Meanwhile, of course, American citizens whose only crime was that their parents came here from a country with which the United States was at war were put into concentration camps. That fact was not lost on my family. "Why didn't they put us in concentration camps?" I asked. "Because they needed our labor for their steel mills," my mother replied.
We libertarians and Objectivists generally maintain a view of American government more appropriate to "Leave it to Beaver" and "Doby Gillis."
Your "rights" (so-called) have always been in jeopardy. The government has always been increasing in power. And we live in a democracy. George Carlin said it well, that the government people do not come here through some kind of membrane from another dimension: they are us. This is a democracy (or a republic, if you will) and we the people rule.
Now, given, what you know about history, how would you design a government that could not expand? What would prevent it from defining its roles within the narrowest latitudes to grow huge?
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 11/24, 8:29am)
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