The week in news

This week, the big news was the proposed ammendment to the constitution. I know why the President supported it, but I think his timing was bad. And it just reinforced one of the reasons I am no longer voting Republican. As I have been clarifying my political opinions, it has come down to a simple statement: I will not vote for people who have a fundamental difference in their belief of the role of government.

In my humble opinion (and that of the founders of our country), government was intended to serve a couple of simple purposes: "Government should keep the peace, coin money, establish a post office, postal roads, and the courts, and secure time-limited copywrights and patents." For those of you whom I sent a "pocket Constitution," that comes from Article 1, Section 8.

However, things began to dramatically change, mostly as we began to get more involved in war. Around the beginning of World War I, the Federal Reserve was created. It near sole purpose was to prevent the reduction in currency purchasing power. It became known to protect the financial markets, but it didn't stop the Depression of 1920-21, or the Great Depression of 1929-1941. In fact, the more government intervenes, the more damage it tends to do. President Franklin Roosevelt hired an economic advisor named John Manynard Keynes. Keynes became lauded for his "central planning," government-controlled economic policy. It supposedly worked until the 1970s when stagflation occurred. In this environment, any "push" in demand, created more inflation, causing higher interest rates and further decline in the purchasing power of our currency. I would argue that Keynes policy didn't work when is supposedly did. England came out of their own depression in 1934, many years before the United States, simply by implementing free-market, supply side policies. Pres. Roosevelt may have kept us in the Depression longer because of his economic policies. This certainly didn't mean that he wasn't a good President. It just means that history's glowing review of his performance may be flawed.

I will close this post with the quote from Thomas Jefferson I found in John Stossel's new book, "Give Me a Break:"

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain."