Source This is a great piece written by Mr. Cotton. It helps expose many of the myths presented by the conservatives on a daily basis. I especially enjoyed the quote by Jefferson warning of the people of unregulated business and the peril it brings. I hope you can all enjoy this article.
1/2 the founding fathers believed in a strong central government. The other half, the anti-Federalists believed in limits on that government. They won and the Bill of Rights was the result.
With the Constitution and the Elastic Clause, I'd have to disagree on George Mason and Co. winning that argument.
The strong central gov't is the constitutional gov't established by the constitution of the United States, which isn't powerful enough to suit the liberals. That's why they use the courts to invent new constitutional language as they go. If only the Left respected the strong gov't envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Epic thread fail. _
The only fail going on this thread is your post. Case in point, look no further than the right's obsession with blasting Obamacare via the Commerce Clause.
The only 'Elastic clause' in the Constitution is the one the Judges invented... The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government lest it come to dominate our lives and interests. Patrick Henry
What a complete joke. The entire constitution is designed to limit the powers of government, try reading it some time. That's why we have checks and balances. That's why the specific powers of each branch are carefully enumerated. The bill of rights was almost not included because it was felt that the constitution had limited the powers of the government to the point where infringing on our rights was beyond the scope of the federal government to begin with. Even the federalists like Hamilton and John Adams would be considered small government folks today. Please read the federalist papers, it's not a hard read nor very long and ignore everything in this absurd piece.
Trying to use the Founding Fathers to support progressive socialism? A Government that now decides which light bulbs people can have in their own homes, and takes money from the rich to give to unproductive welfare leeches? Good luck with that. You're better off downplaying the importance of the Constitution like other leftists are doing. That propaganda strategy will be more effective. Tell Mr. Soros.
You fell through the looking glass some time ago. Posts like this are just the aftermath of that fall.
O.P. says what???? Incredible that Liberals will attempt to re-write history in such a radical way. When I saw the thread title, I thought ROFL! Joke thread... but mugabe was serious. Clearly delusional post.
HB, care to refute anything the article says or are you taking a page out of Yosh's page and already dumbing down to insults?
Careful, boys. These are the sounds embarrassed liberals make before they call in the authorities. Like the rattle at the end of a venomous snake's tail...
Falling through the looking glass (suffering from inverted thinking) is an insult to you? What are doing in a forum where people's ideas and reasoning are constantly being questioned and impugned? Isn't it too hot for you in here? The idea that the government can force you to buy something has been discussed to death. There is nothing in the constitution that remotely suggests the government has that sort of authoritarian permission from it (the constitution, that is).
Watch out! That's insulting! Your complaints would be less sad if you weren't being hypocritical here.
You have got to be kidding me. The health insurance industry is getting a huge windfall from the government forcing everyone to do business with them. They've also benefited for a long time thanks to sympathetic governments that limited their competition for them. Without big government there would be NO defense industry to speak of. Wall Street financiers? Who was it that just gave them boatloads of cash when they got themselves in a pickle? Not only do those industries NOT want weak government but use their resources to insure that big government exists and stays in their pocket. Perhaps we shouldn't take everything that Brad Cotton writes in some tiny local Ohio newspaper at face value?
I don't care to refute anything in the article. I think you should at least read Hamilton's essays in the federalist papers before claiming he was a statist. Hamilton wanted a strong centralized government not in the sense of micro-managing the economy. Such issues were to be left to the state. See my signature, that's a line from Madison on the balance of power between state and federal government. Hamilton wanted a permanent standing army to squash class warfare rebellions in the states. None of the founders envisioned a federal welfare state.
Your article purports to convey the Founders' beliefs on government, yet it lacks even a single quote from them on the Constitution or their political philosphy, and the only quotes it does provide lack any bit of relevance whatsoever to the nature of government or how the Founders viewed it. The latter quote concerning "monied corporations" is actually in reference to the battle over a central bank, which Jefferson vehemently opposed and which progressives like you blindly defend. How ironic is that?
There's nothing to refute. It's just a bunch of self-serving assertions with no evidence. The two Jefferson quotes lend absolutely no credence to your laughably idiotic claim that the Founders believed in a "strong" central government. If you had actually bothered to read letter one of the Federalist papers or Thomas Paine's Common Sense, you would realize just how utterly stupid your article is.
I lol'd at the complete schism from the 1st to 2nd paragraph, never mind the whole piece. The first paragraph talks about Washington and his troops, and the second paragraph jumps into Reagan wanting to dismantle the New Deal put forth by FDR. It looks like the author ate some alphabet soup and tried to crap out a sentence.
