Dr. Walter Williams has another good column out today which examines Constitution Day which is coming up on Sept. 17. A good thing right? Good except for the hypocrisy of many who passed the bill creating the official day:
Let's examine just a few statements by the framers to see just how much faith and allegiance today's Americans give to the U.S. Constitution. James Madison is the acknowledged father of the Constitution. In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief for French refugees who fled from insurrection in San Domingo (now Haiti) to Baltimore and Philadelphia, James Madison said disapprovingly, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
Today, at least two-thirds of a $2.5 trillion federal budget is spent on "objects of benevolence." That includes Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, aid to higher education, farm and business subsidies, welfare, etc., ad nauseam.
But Madison wasn't the only leader who recognized that charity falls within the purview of the private, not the government:
Some presidents had similar constitutional respect. In 1854, President Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill to help the mentally ill, saying, "I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity," adding that to approve the measure "would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded."What, then, the socialist might ask, IS the proper role of government? Dr. Williams answers this by quoting the Federalist Papers:
James Madison explained the constitutional limits on federal power in Federalist Paper No. 45: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined ... [to] be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce."What's so hard to understand about that?
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