When the Founding Fathers designed our constitution, they recognized the reality that government should have limitations and focus totally on the important things to protect the nation and the liberties of its citizens. For the first 150 years, the government did an excellent job of staying in its own narrowly focused lane. At about the 160-year point under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the federal government stepped onto that slippery slope that has resulted in the totally out of control waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money we see in 2026.

"The more things a government undertakes to do, the fewer things it can do completely. When the government tries to do everything it must do everything badly." ~ Henry Hazlitt

"Every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people." ~ John F. Kennedy

When those men of the First and Second Continental Congress got together and designed the new United States’ government as documented in the United States Constitution, it was the best educated collection of men who knew human history and human behavior, before or since. These men took into account the foibles of human beings and the foibles of previous governments throughout history and designed the best government to have ever existed on the planet. These men knew they were not designing a perfect government, only the most perfect government so far.

The House of Representatives was designed to represent the people of the respective states. However, the Senate was designed to represent the legislature of the respective states. Lastly, the President was to represent all of the citizens of the nation. The government was well designed and working as designed. Then in 1913, less well-educated men started mucking around with the Constitution and ratified the XVII Amendment to the Constitution and weakened it by making Senators representative of the people, duplicating the House of Representatives, rather than representing the state legislature, thus weakening the state legislature’s voices in Washington, DC. This also weakened the design of the Constitution. The Constitution’s Article I representatives have been running amuck ever since.

"Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." ~ James Madison

"Government welfarism, with its ever-increasing army of pensioners and other beneficiaries, is fatally easy to launch and fatally easy to extend, but almost impossible to bring to a halt - and quite impossible politically to reverse, no matter how obvious and catastrophic its consequences become." ~ Henry Hazlitt

In 1935, the American government stepped onto that slippery slope to massive corruption with the Social Security Act. This was a usurpation of individual responsibility for caring for oneself and a violation of the powers granted to the federal government by the 10^th Amendment to the Constitution. Just as important, the “guarantees” in the original Social Security Act have been violated more than once.

Since WWII, the progressives (another word for communists) closeted in the Democrat party and the Deep State have turned the federal government into a socialist charity nanny state. This is something that Madison insisted is not a government function. That is another function usurped by the federal from churches and individual citizens, and contrary to provisions of the 10^th Amendment to the United States Constitution. And as Kennedy and Hazlitt pointed out, this is something that has been done extremely poorly, as evidenced by the level of corruption so far discovered in the last two years.

The federal government cannot or will not properly manage and account for taxpayer money used for charity-like purposes (wealth redistribution). What we know as an absolute certainty is that the federal government has not been a proper steward of the taxpayer money used for charity-like programs. I will be so bold as to say as much as one-third of our national debt that was accumulated in the last 60 years has been squandered in fraud, bribery, and other forms of corruption, with minimal amounts going to the intended purpose. If federal government can’t do it right, the federal government should not be doing it at all.

Steve Rossiter——Bio and Archives

After a 55 year career as a professional pilot in the military, in law enforcement, in the private sector, and in federal civil service, I am now retired.

In many of these positions I repeatedly took an oath to defend the United States Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.