A Timid Observer

It’s quite amazing to see, especially nowadays in our current political climate, how easily people take very vital thing for granted.  I’m talking specifically about government.

It seems that a good number of Americans don’t understand anything about government, nor how broadly dependent they are on it, even while saying things like “Keep your government hands off of my Medicare!”  It’s very troubling how quickly we forget how much the government does do for us.  For starters, you use government to build and maintain roads – the interstate highway system was the biggest public works project in American history.  Did you go to public school?  The government put it there.  Is America safe from its enemies?  A government-run military takes care of that (and it blows my mind how some people argue that government supposedly can’t do anything, but never comment on the military, a government run entity).  Is your air and water safe?  Thank government-enforced regulations for that.

Throughout history, government has expanded and intervened to aid the progression of American society.  Think about it.  It has happened at several points in our history for the betterment of society as a whole – things that so many of us arrogantly take for granted.  Going back first to the 1960s, Congress passed Medicare and Medicaid, programs that were passed because we thought it morally wrong that the elderly and the poor go broke because they got sick or injured.  People on the right cried “socialism!” and “government takeover of whatever!”  And did it happen?  No.

Continuing back to the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs brought real relief to the American people and set America on the road to recovery.  My conservative opponents will here point to the recession of 1937 and say “Government expansion caused this recession within a depression!”  The opposite is true: Republican Congressional victories in 1938 and several hostile Supreme Court rulings pulled the rug out from under the New Deal programs and without government money being pumped into the economy, it collapsed, unable to stand on its own.  The problem of the New Deal wasn’t that FDR did too much, it’s that he did too little!

And let’s not forget some of those very important institutions and reforms that came out of the New Deal: Social Security, The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and The Fair Labor Standards Act, just to name a few.

Moving back further to the early part of the 20^th century, the progressive reforms brought the United States into the 20^th century.  Scary big government programs like the Food and Drug Administration were established.  The Clayton Anti-Trust Act prevented the infamous trusts from unethically manipulating the economy.  Our food is safer to eat because of regulations enacted through the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt.  We have our national forests and parks because of the Antiquities Act, also signed by TR in 1906.  Perhaps it is because we haven’t lived in a time without these government actions and programs that we so easily take them for granted.

And let us not forget when government literally held the country together.  The United States is one nation, indivisible, and in 1865 that creed was upheld with the surrender of the rebel Confederacy.  It was a brutal and bloody fight, but the United States is what it is today because, as they say, “Washington got involved”.

A criticism that I would expect of my opponents is that American aversion to accepting government expansion and intervention is what keeps the United States from being taken over by a powerful elite.  There is a nugget of truth in this.  Natural suspicion of authority and power is a good thing, but there is a fine line between reasonable skepticism – which is utterly essential for democracy and freedom to thrive – and paranoid rejection of government in all forms, especially when the government not expanding or intervening would be detrimental to society (Wall St, anyone?).

So before you raise your voice to say that the government has no potential to do good for its people and society, think of how much you are already benefiting from the government.  It may not be perfect, but isn’t our American struggle one to form “a more perfect union”?