The Federal Government: A History of Failure

In 1910, the United States’ national debt was $2.653 Billion; which represented 8% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product).

In 2010, the national debt was $13.529 Trillion; which represented 93.4% of GDP.

During those 100 years, only the Coolidge administration (1923 - 1929) reduced the national debt. The remaining 93 years—regardless which party held the presidency or controlled congress—saw the national debt grow.

Bolstered by a unrestrained central bank (the Federal Reserve; a private banking cartel), both the legislative and executive branches of the federal government’s penchant for spending simply ran amok; all the while ignoring the law of the land in order to soothe the peoples’ perception of event induced socioeconomic fears.

Events such as the sinking(s) of the USS Maine and RMS Lusitania became cause celebre as the USA’s worldview-foreign policy underwent a change from one of non-interventionism -- to that of Woodrow Wilson’s Wilsonianism; to wit: a foreign policy of engagement; dedicated to the spread of democracy, the opening of new markets, and the establishment of a world body (the League of Nations) commissioned to act as coordinating arbiter of such an effort.

Thus, the stage was set for the expansion of hegemonic trends in America’s already aggressive foreign policy. Witness the growing list of U. S. military operations and their ill-begotten [partial] consequences.

On the domestic front there are “wars” of a different sort. Prohibition (the war on alcohol), social engineering (the New Deal’s response to the Great Depression and Johnson’s War on Poverty), and the War on Drugs have given rise to a plethora of federal bureaucracies and their respective law enforcement agencies. There are currently more than 100,000 armed federal agents in service to their respective agencies.

9/11 and the specter of a terrorist under every rock have engulfed the nation—as well as a plurality of it’s people—in a perpetual state of anxiety; thereby alleviating the hue and cry of a vocal but largely silenced citizenry; who are justifiably displeased at the incremental deprivation of their civil liberties and economic freedom.

Building upon victorious military engagements, seemingly noble policies of foreign aid, and the peoples’ latent generosity, there is a conceptual change that has been creeping into the lexicon of patriotic political rhetoric that is often referred to as American exceptionalism. The first [known] use of the word “exceptional”—as relates to the socioeconomic and cultural state of the USA—was offered by Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic, Democracy in America.

Tocqueville marveled at the typically simplistic and near-governmentally benign New England Township; which managed their affairs with little to no formal elections; and where most issues central to the townsfolk as a whole were accomplished through voluntary associations.

Particularly worthy of mention is the glue that, in the words of Tocqueville, held such loosely bound arrangements together: "In the United States the sovereign authority is religious,... there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its utility and of its conformity to human nature than that its influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth."

Central to the practical functionality of virtue in early America -- is Tocqueville’s observation of Christianity’s influence over the “souls of men.” In the America of today, however, there is a tangible presence of hatred filled divisiveness permeating most every facet of the peoples’ existence; with the following data documenting a symbolic moral decline in what was once the world’s most advanced and righteous civilization:

-- “With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.”

-- In 1960 there were 160.9 violent crimes committed per 100 thousand people; in 2010 there were 403.6 crimes in that same category.

-- In a May 1996 interview with CBS’s Lesley Stahl, then U. S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright justifies the death—resulting from UN/US enforced sanctions—of 500,000 Iraqi children.

-- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that there are 19 million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in the United States every year.

-- Today, more than 46 million people are recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) (was previously “food stamps”).

-- Government payouts—including Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance—make up more than one-third of the total wages and salaries of the U. S. population . . .

-- 41 percent of all births in the U.S. are to unmarried women.

These are but a few of America’s heretofore unimaginable socioeconomic and cultural complications; all created by people who have neither first hand knowledge of what it takes to push a wheelbarrow full of mortar or stoke a furnace with coke for eight hours a day; nor an inkling to even try to understand the plight of those who formerly constituted our nation’s very economic foundation -- those who do the grunt work in the building and manufacturing of things.

After selling their souls to money and banking interests, the misguided determination of the political class continue their arrogant, ignorant, immoral and unabated onslaught on the founding principles that had held us together as a people. By allowing them to continue to do so ... we will continue to suffer the consequences.

Lest there remain any doubt as to the corrupted culture of the political class, please take note of what this candidate said about the war in Iraq in 2007; and what this 2012 pro-life candidate was saying in 2002.