Column for March 25, 2010

There are some things that government can do well. Just this morning, my wife was remarking about how efficient the Town of Selma is about picking up yard debris and other items left at the side of the road. This weekend we did a lot of needed yard work. We also have moved furniture, boxes, limbs, etc. to the curb and they were quickly removed.

Compare that to the road kill that never seems to get picked up along side the highways of North Carolina. I have literally seen deer carcasses rot away to nothing after laying around for a month or two. The state, it seems, is not as efficient at managing the minutia as a small town. This is true of most things the higher up you go in levels of government.

The national government is good at doing a few things. They seem to be good at fielding a military that is quite capable of blowing things up and killing people. That is what I want a military to be able to do. The government seems to be good at building roads, which is good for all citizens.

The national government is not, however, efficient at running people's lives for them. The Social Security system is about broke. The Post Office is broke. The Medicare system is broke. And yet the same government that has run these institutions into the ground now expects us to trust them with our health care system.

I went to bed in a free country and woke up in a socialist nation this morning. "Welkum to Amerika, Comrades" is my greeting to you all. 219 men and women who are either willfully ignorant of or blatantly disregard the Constitution of the United States have voted for and passed sweeping health care legislation that is sure to be signed into law. Forget the fact that most of them have not read the bill much less understand it.

Just about every week, I have joined two friends of mine and taught on the US Constitution and read line upon line the notes from the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Nowhere can I find a single line or even a hint that the government should assist with much less regulate how you seek medical care. For that matter, I do not see where the Social Security system or Medicare is legal, either.

In order to buy the votes of some so called "pro-life" Democrats, President Obama has issued an executive order (also nowhere to be found in the Constitution) prohibiting the use of federal tax dollars to fund abortions, even though such a provision exists in the law. Sorry, but law trumps a presidential edict. So much for being pro-life.

There are a couple of other things I found that government does well. First, spend money. I do not have a problem with the government spending money on principle. I do however, believe that the spending should be parsimonious, legal, and done with great wisdom. Waste, fraud, and abuse are rampant in our state and national governments. Unconstitutional spending abounds at the federal level. I am convinced that if the national government would just cease all spending not permitted by the US Constitution, our national debt and budget would diminish to a fraction of current status.

Second, government excels at taking away freedom. Whether it is Selma's attempt at controlling land outside its town limits with an extra-territorial jurisdiction expansion and forced annexation or the federal government regulating your health care options, government is good at chipping away at your liberty.

James Madison said, "All that seems indispensable in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former." That is exactly what we have been doing in this nation since The New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt and further broadened under Johnson's Great Society. Now we have Obamacare and profligate spending with job bills and stimulus spending packages.

There is no way that we can continue this degradation in Amerika. We can not afford to go the way of socialized medicine, profligate spending, and redistribution of wealth. They have failed everywhere else in the world that they have been tried, so why, comrades, do we go down this same path here in Amerika?