State of Federal Government

The United States government is an interesting thing. From our very founding, we have been nothing short of liquid, always changing and moving and redefining our Union and what role we want our government to play. From the Founding Fathers, to current day, the country has gone through more face lifts than any Hollywood starlet could dream of, and yet, we still keep plodding along. When the country was first founded, the Fathers originally wanted very little government interference on the common man—they, however, soon learned that a strong, and larger than they would like, central Federal Government was necessary to hold the colonies together; otherwise, we’d be a series of countries rather than states in a whole. Since then we have been expanding the role of the Federal government in our lives. Using to increase our standard of living, reign in corrupt business practices, and helping the poor get a leg up in a hard world that works against them at seemingly every turn. That was, until the eighties, when devolution of the Federal Government started—where we began to put less emphasis on individual and wellness programs, and more on our bottom line.

Most people are citing the will of the Founding Fathers for the reason of this deregulation of business, and defunding of social programs. I think, however, that is erroneous. The thirteen colonies and their inhabitants wouldn’t know what today looks like, couldn’t have, and wouldn’t be able to comprehend the sheer scale of commerce and trade—as well as connection—that we as a country have with the rest of the world. They also wouldn’t be able to understand how many people live here, and just how many no longer do farming work or artisan trade. To compare this current United States of America to the original thirteen, is foolish at best. We have taken the outline of our Fathers and furthered it, expanded it, turned this country into one so great that merely the speculation of our actions affects every other country on the face of the planet. We have had to adjust and adapt to a changing world, and to go, for lack of a better term, backwards seems contradictory. We shouldn’t try to cement ourselves, as we have never been a thing of unchanging stone, but instead, stay flexible, and fluid, and ever progressing.  

We shouldn't whittle the Federal Government away until there is nothing left. What will happen to our public schools? A national standard has been in place since the sixties, but there has been calls to let states decide how to educate their children. This is a bad idea, as soon you will not have a universal knowledge among the public and our future generations will suffer. This applies to businesses as well. The Great Depression was caused, not only by the invention of credit, but also businesses speculating and having increasing control over the nations wealth. The New Deal and the presidents of the time put in regulations to assure that this would never happen again. As soon as we started to take those regulations away, we slip into the Great Recession, and now are struggling to recover. We need a strong Federal Government for the benefit of our people.