goalie wrote:Answer: because of the hypocritical nature of so many people who pretend to desire "small" government, but who, through their actions, demonstrate that they desire a lot of government that supports their beliefs, and "small" government for the other stuff they don't agree with.
I don't think that's it. Despite all the lip-service given to freedom and liberty, and a government by and of the people, a significant number of people (perhaps even the majority) simply prefer to be ruled rather than represented. I believe that the human condition naturally leans towards a monarchical style of government, and we can see this today with the the likes of the Clintons, Bushes, Kenedys, Pauls, etc. We as a society elect a ruling class that become modern day monarchs, and it becomes incredibly difficult to unseat them, often even under evidence of extreme corruption.
I don't believe that free people are born, but that they are raised. People need to be taught how to be responsible for their own lives and their own safety. They need to be taught to watch their government, and to take corrective action when necessary. This is the main thing that I believe is missing from our education system today, and the result is that people naturally tend to transfer the role their parents held during childhood to their government during adulthood. People naturally gravitate to having a controlling power figure ruling over them, keeping them safe and making the hard decisions for them. The reason that America succeeded so fantastically was that rugged individualism was bred into our children. Adult dependency on a ruling class was shameful, and people were taught how to take responsibility for their own lives.
While people bicker over marriage, the sequester, immigration, whatever the most recent manufactured crisis is, they are ignoring the fact that we have become the very country we fought to free ourselves from not so long ago. The majority of the country is dependent on government for at least some of their basic needs, and a not-insignificant portion is
entirely dependent for all of their basic needs. We have almost no liberty left at all - liberty being the absence of government intrusion. Our liberty is gone, our privileges prohibitively restricted, and our rights under constant attack. The people's contract with the government, that the government be constrained to only those powers expressly granted it by the people is all but shredded, the separation of concerns of office types has been eliminated, and even the separation of powers appears to be breaking down with more and more powers being claimed by the executive.
Our problems in this country have absolutely nothing to do with immigration, gay marriage, etc. It's not even economic. It's that we have allowed ourselves to be subjugated by our own government, and had those characteristics necessary for individualism and the maintaining of free state bred out of us. The window to fix this is closing fast, and I worry we'll find ourselves distracted by these manufactured crisis until after it's too late.
End of rant.
