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Has Government Grown Beyond The Consent Of The Governed?

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“Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.”

~ Ronald Reagan

 

Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan spoke passionately and eloquently at his first Inaugural address about the size of government. A large part of his speech that day was a genuine concern about an out-of-control federal government and how his new administration would work to reduce that growth and decrease regulations. As much as Reagan did during the 1980’s to try and rein in government and allow for more personal independence to live life as each individual saw fit we have seen government balloon to an even more expansive behemoth.

America is at a critical point in history. This republic, as it currently stands, sits at a precipice. With a $30 trillion national debt that continues to grow at an alarming rate, with no end in sight, and a new Biden administration eager to grow government bureaucracy and spend like drunken sailors, we must ask some serious questions.

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Has government grown beyond the consent of the governed? How much government does a nation need? What percentage of the population believes that more government is the answer to all that ails us? These questions require us to engage in critical discussions as a country to decide our fate. Failing to have a rational conversation about the size and scope of government only increases our odds of destroying America.

Our Founding Fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to escape from the tyranny of an overgrown government bureaucracy and create a constitutional representative republic. They intended for limited government that allowed people to live their own lives freely without government bureaucracy restricting their ability to earn a living. The federal government was limited in the powers it had. States were given the primary power to run their governments as they saw fit.

Over time the federal government has grown. Under FDR and the New Deal, government bureaucracy ballooned in an effort to put people to work and address the economic hardships brought on by the Great Depression. This was a real shift towards big central government planning and a diminishing of the self-governing independence our republic had been built on.

Then as the 1960’s unfolded, LBJ and “The Great Society” programs added another layer of increasing government bureaucracy. It created such programs as Medicare and Medicaid and greatly increased entitlement spending and social programs to combat poverty and racial injustice. It made the food stamp program permanent and created more federal agencies and bureaucracy. As history shows us, when new government programs and agencies are established, they never sunset and go away. They continue to grow and need to be fed more taxpayer money.

The 1970’s brought more government bureaucracy and created new agencies such as OSHA, the EPA, and a new Department of Education. The Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002, combining 22 different federal departments and agencies into a unified and integrated cabinet agency. The list goes on and on. More government bureaucracy with more taxpayer money needed to run Washington D.C.

Have the American people grown increasingly weary of this bloated federal government? A recent Rasmussen Reports polling survey conducted back in November of 2020 seems to indicate they have indeed. It found that 59% of Likely U.S. Voters agree with Reagan’s Inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Just 27% disagreed and 14% were undecided. Noteworthy, that is the highest level of agreement on that question since Rasmussen Reports started asking it back in 2008. What’s even more interesting is that even 50% of Democrats agree with Reagan’s statement. The percentages are higher for those unaffiliated with a party (58%) and Republicans (70%).

In another polling survey conducted by Gallup, they asked Americans if the federal government had too much power, the right amount, or too little. The most recent data was back in September of 2019 and found 56% of the respondents felt the federal government had too much power compared to 38% who felt it was about the right amount. A year earlier that percentage was 53%. Since 2005, the percentage of Americans who say the federal government has too much power has been at 50% or higher. So clearly, a majority of the American people have at least a sense that government has grown too expansive.

Has government grown beyond the consent of the governed? The argument can be made it most definitely has. While there is a percentage of Americans who believe that government is the solution to all of our problems there seems to be enough people still of the belief that too much government is a problem that needs to be addressed.

This shouldn’t be a right or left issue. This should be a genuine concern no matter what your political views may be. As government expands, freedom and liberty continues to contract. We have seen this truth play out over the last several decades of our republic.

The time to rein in government is now front and center. The American people need to have an open and honest conversation about the continued growth of government. It’s time for the governed to reassert their role as the boss. If Americans truly value their independence and self-reliance then it is imperative to alter this course we are on. Failure to do our due diligence will ultimately result in the loss of our constitutional republic and place us back in the chains of tyranny.

 

“A free people cannot shift their responsibility for them to the government. Self-government means self-reliance.”

~ Calvin Coolidge

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Michael was born and raised in Wisconsin and is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin with a BA-History. He started writing a blog in January 2016 called, Conservative Thinker, and has written about politics, foreign policy, economics, and social issues with a historical perspective. He resides in Cullman, AL and enjoys hiking, photography, and traveling in his spare time. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram @buckyboymike and follow his blog at www.conservativethinker.net.



 
 
 

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Politics

How Hating White People Became the New National Sport

Anti-white books have been forced upon millions of intimidated white employees and upon vulnerable children

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Reviewing an advanced copy of Ed Brodow’s The War on Whites: How Hating White People Became the New National Sport is a major education. The author makes it abundantly clear that amidst political correctness and the cancel culture, Americans are afraid to discuss the issue of race.

Not Remaining Quiet

Anyone seeking to express honest views on the race problem is labeled a racist if he is white, or an Uncle Tom, if he is black. Most people simply keep quiet.

Ed Brodow has elected not to remain quiet and his new book, The War on Whites, explores the truth about such provocative topics as systemic racism, white supremacy, and diversity.

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The War on Whites unmasks what Brodow calls the “anti-white racial inquisition that is poisoning America.” While we are accustomed to defining racism as discrimination aimed exclusively at black people, Brodow expands the definition to encompass discrimination against whites, which he says is just as onerous as discrimination against blacks or anyone else.

Code Language

What the Left calls “anti-racism” is merely code language for racism against white people. Trashing whites, he says, has become an acceptable part of American life.

Brodow expounds upon how whites are being demonized, marginalized, stereotyped, denigrated, and suppressed at every turn. “We have reached the point where legions dislike white people,” he says. “It’s not just people of color. Even white people dislike white people. It is open season on whites and, as strange as it might seem, large segments of the white population are all for it.” Many gullible whites are ashamed to be white and apologize at every turn..

The War on Whites exposes the insidious reality of diversity training. These popular trainings are now a multi-billion-dollar industry. They fail, however, to create more diversity, Brodow says. They are all about racial indoctrination, not racial sensitivity. Their actual purpose is to suppress white people.

Undo Who You Are

Training sponsored by the City of Seattle and the Coca-Cola Company are typical of programs that demand white employees “undo their whiteness.” The media do not report this, yet, if black people were required to “undo their blackness,” he says, riots would ensue.

Citing the opinions of leading black thinkers – Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Bob Woodson, Candace Owens, Larry Elder, and John McWhorter – the author offers a convincing argument that systemic racism and white privilege are myths invented to demonize whites and foment racial division. “Systemic racism no longer exists in the United States,” he says. “Individual instances of racism are occurring and always will occur, against both blacks and whites, but to suggest that racism is institutionalized ignores the progress of the past 60 years.”

Rather than exhibiting systemic racism, white Americans have bent over backwards to make life better for blacks and other minorities. With the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, he says, “whites made it possible for blacks and other minorities to become full partners in the American Dream.

For the Good of Everyone

White power was unchallenged up to that time. Yet willingly, unilaterally, they relinquished it. No one forced them. They acted because it was the right thing to do. 58 years later, what are they receiving in return? Contempt, hatred, and intolerance.”

Brodow critiques Joe Biden’s executive order on equity. Biden, he says, is attempting to replace America’s belief in equality with an illegal policy that marginalizes whites. The objective of equity is not equality of opportunity, but rather equality of outcome. Everyone should have the same income, job success, house, neighborhood, etc.

Biden’s policy, Brodow says, will ensure that all new federal employees will be selected based upon their skin color so that preference can be given to non-whites.

Antiracist Literature That is Racist

Brodow analyzes popular racist literature exemplified by Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. These anti-white books have been forced upon millions of intimidated white employees and upon vulnerable children. Brodow says that the purpose of White Fragility is make whites feel guilty about being white.

DiAngelo asserts that if you are white and doubt that you are a racist, it is proof you are a racist. Kendi’s book advocates that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” DiAngelo and Kendi, both of whom hate white people, demand that all whites should confess their racism.

Actually, anyone who is coerced into reading either or both of these books should read The War on Whites.

The Whole Story

At a time when national unity, cooperation, and understanding are needed more than ever, vast segments of our population are doing all they can to demonize white people. The War on Whites tells the whole story.

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News

Mainstream Media: Intentionally and Diabolically Unfair and Unbalanced

All pretense that the mainstream media strives for objectivity is gone

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by Jay DeLancey and Jeff Davidson

The grandest mistake the American populace committed in the last half-century was assuming that our media was even somewhat fair and balanced. Likewise proceeding in the last two decades as if the Internet giants had no dog in the political arena proved to be a mistake of historical proportions.

Today because so many people, still, are conditioned as such, the mere fact that say, a CNN, has a website prompts some people to believe that the network have something of value to offer. Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, whose focus is classics and military history, says that the New York Times is “a shell of what it used to be.”

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Nothing Objective to Offer

The paper always leaned to the left, since it’s founding, but it did an intermittently semi-decent job in reporting the facts. The Times sent their reporters out to the streets to do hard-core reporting. The mission was to gather relevant data, identify sources, talk to people, find eye witnesses, speak to bonafide experts, attain corroboration, and then when they were sure of what they had written, submit the story or feature.

Their articles probably never represented a 50-50 balance – perhaps 55-45 or 60-40 in favor of the left. Today, no rational media observer would contend that the balance is 70-30, or even 80-20. Study after study reveals, say, in the case of covering Donald Trump, that 92% of all features are negative, and that is not to say the remaining 8% are positive. Mostly, they’re neutral.

If you are a Trump or DeSantis supporter, or a Republican running for Senate or the House of Representatives, for governor in your state, or for any other position of prominence, you simply cannot expect a fair shake from the press, nationally, and in most cases locally. Indeed, you’re likely to be demonized, endlessly, over issues foo which Democrats receive a free pass.

Compromised to the Breaking Point

The New York Times and The Washington Post of old, as biased as they might’ve been, at least offered some semblance of up-to-date information, with facts and figures when they had them, and timely reporting as situations unfolded. Hansen remarked that today the people who run these newspapers are trading on the decades of hard work and the reputations built up over more than 100 years.

Those who put in the seed work are dead and gone and thus, obviously, have no say about what’s going on today. The Times and the Post, in less than a generation, are destroying their own reputations. The people who currently run these ‘news’ organizations are dragging them down at warp speed and don’t even recognize the damage that they are doing.

By 2030, what is now a shell of an organization will be less so, and it wouldn’t be too wild to predict that the Times could totally morph into something else. The Post is not far behind in devising its own demise.

The Pretense is Gone

Each of the countless newspapers that feed off of these two publishing giants suffer as well. All such pretense that the mainstream media strives for objectivity is gone. The good news, if you could call it that, is everyone on the right is now vitally all aware that this has happened.

Those who strive for integrity in elections, those who are on the right, and those who are routinely demonized by the left, understand what’s occurring to the nth degree. It’s not fair, but to know what you face is a benefit of sorts.

 

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