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John Stossel Goes to Washington - finds government is
out of control! ABC
News reporter John
Stossel understands
that if you want to change behavior, you must change the
costs and benefits associated with different behavioral
choices. Stossel's
TV special last Friday showed an important application of
this principle to American government. Because
citizens no longer demand that our government limit itself
to the powers enumerated in Article 1, Section 8 of our
Constitution, the cost of government has gone out of
control. The
picture at right - from Stossel's special - shows how what
government costs each citizen has mushroomed out of control
since the 1930s and the Roosevelt New Deal. From a cost of
$20 during the Jefferson administration in 1800, the cost of
goverment has risen to over $10,000 per citizen per
year. How
do we change this? The
generation that founded America - that wrote the Declaration
and the Constitution - believed that goverment was a servant
they empowered merely to protect them from external
aggression by providing for the national defense, and from
internal aggression by maintaining a court
system. They
realized that goverment could not "give" something to them
unless it first took something from them. If government took
for any purpose other than those laid down in the
Constitution it was stealing. When,
we, the recipients of countless forms of wealth
redistribution from social security to corporate welfare
again see these "gifts" as the proceeds of goverment theft
from our fellow citizens we will be able to once again
control the cost of government. But
not until then.
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