Government has increased geometrically since the founding of the Republic in 1789. The Founding Fathers were quite clear about government's limited role. Jefferson and his colleagues envisioned a nation of private individuals and private enterprise governed only by their good sense. The 'pursuit of happiness' enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, was to be followed only within the context of community, a self-interested, self-regulated activity moderated by respect for others.
It was not meant as a free-for-all, a get-mine gold rush, but a temperate individualism. There was more than enough for everyone, said Jefferson, and the country could only become a nation if the energies and ambitions of individuals were harnessed for the good of the many.
This was by no means a call for collectivism or some kind of communalism but simply a recognition of the ineluctable, innate individual drive for betterment and prosperity, and the understanding that only through mutually self-interested collaboration can they both be realized to the fullest.
Government was not a facilitator, an engineer of wealth, or a guarantor of well-being. It was only to provide the legal and legislative framework within which inevitable disputes could be settled and rights adjudicated. When Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark out on their voyage of Western discovery, the President was quick to enable a careful mapping, plotting, and delineation of territory. Land grabs would be things of the past as the new settlements would be based on proper ownership, title, and the subsequent valuation of the land. Property would be the key, the foundation to the new prosperity.
Ports, railways, roads and highways were private enterprises and developers looked to government not for assistance or investment but for a formal system of organization and order - rights of way, recorded titles, official records of land ownership - and the means for contesting unlawful claims.
Government was also necessary for national defense. The days of militias were over. While they were instrumental in the victory against the British in the Revolutionary War, defending the new nation required a unified force, one with structure, chain of command, and ability to grow and maintain strength.
That was it, but in an inexorable move to expand the role of government above and beyond these important Constitutional principles, successive administrations with Congressional support grew government to the behemoth that it now is. Explaining the phenomenon is simple. Elected officials represented individual legislative districts needed some means of paying back those who sent them to Washington, and government largesse was the way. These politicians siphoned the very taxpayer monies paid to federal coffers as gifts to reward the faithful - a delightful circle to enrich everyone.
The more money paid in, the more money flowed down the federal sluices, and in time these same politicians decided they needed some federal infrastructure to devise more and better schemes for the use of such ingratiating gifts; and so the bureaucracy was born. Big government was a fact, a necessity, and politicians and constituents formed a cabal of entitlement.
Now under the new Trump administration, government is being dismantled. Although many administrations have vowed to reduce the size and influence of government, only this one has actually done something. Elon Musk and DOGE (Department Of Government Efficiency) have methodically and unhesitatingly exposed the federal bureaucracy for what it was - a paper mill of redundancy, waste, intellectual incompetence if not fraud, and unnecessary regulations. The bureaucracy had become a bloated, overfed nightmarish place better suited to obstruct democracy than encourage it.
'Hold your horses', shouted progressives who had bet the store on big government. They, since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, have looked at government as not only caretaker of the common weal, but intervenor-in-chief, a mechanism to determine how individuals should behave, react, and respond; to tell the people what to do and how to do it. Government was to be he arbiter of worth, value, and individual prosperity. It was to tell us what to say and how, what to believe, and how to vote, The size of government did not simply arrogate financial authority to Washington, but moral authority as well.
The Trump dismantling of the bureaucracy was only the most visible sign of the dismantling of government itself, rejecting interventionism, communalism, and the redistribution of individual wealth, but the elimination of all pretentious centralized moralism. America would be a free country again.
'What about the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginalized, and the oppressed', shouted Bob Muzelle, and old social justice warrior who had cut his political teeth in the halcyon years of government interventionism and caretaker oversight. Without a generous government, black people would fall farther in to poverty, misery, and hopelessness.
Those days are over, said a Trump spokesman. It is time to return the nation and all its citizens to one of personal responsibility, patriotism, and hard work. The national ethos should once again be enterprise and opportunity and not a free lunch, identity, and faux harmony.
Of course Bob cried foul, and said that such policies were fascist, racist, and anti-democratic. Trump was turning his back on the needy to enrich the wealthy. His was an arrogation of dictatorial power, a determined move to turn America into an autocratic dictatorship.
Most Americans wanted no part of this hysteria, and saw only a recalibration of society, returning it to natural equilibria, restoring individual enterprise and the freedoms stated in the Bill of Rights but overturned.
Trump's populism was Jeffersonian - a belief in the natural intelligence of the people and their willingness to prosper within a competitive community of equal entrepreneurs. Not everyone could become an industrial magnate, but the opening of unrivaled opportunity was the first step.
What about welfare, aid to dependent children, food stamps, training programs, environmental protection, and brakes on robber baron capitalist excess? Under Trump the country would become a new Wild West, an untamed, inchoate place of greed and unholy ambition.
Nonsense, said Trump. Fol-de-rol, exaggeration and fear-mongering. These programs have simply fueled the expansion of obstructionist big government, stifled enterprise and opportunity, clogged the nation's productive pathways. The country was built on individualism and private enterprise and has only recently become mired in inefficiency, waste, and bureaucratic oversight.
Or, man up! The free ride is over. Back to basics and back to originalism and Constitutional principle.
Bob turned to his wife and said, 'Oh, God, what have we done?', and disconsolate, a man who felt that his whole life of doing good had been neutered and devalued by this unconscionable turn of events, babbled like a baby.
'There, there Bobby, what goes around comes around', she said, putting her arms around him, quietly and a bit seditiously happy that the penury of a life of dutiful goodness might finally be coming to an end; but she had no idea how right she was. Once government - that longstanding, entrenched, seemingly unshakeable institution - is pulled up by the roots, tossed aside, and the land cleared for private development, there is no going back.
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