Here are the top eight moments of government expansion from the past decade, as decided by me. Obviously, this is my opinion and these are in no order of importance. These are simply the top eight events that led to continued growth of government.
You may be wondering why I didn’t do a list of ten, as seems customary with these end of year lists? 10 is simply an arbitrary length for these types of lists. I got tired of creating this list after 8.
Enjoy and have a Happy and Free New Year!
1. 9/11 - Aside from being an extremely tragic event, this event was used for political cover by politicians seeking to consolidate power. The very government that was unable to prevent these disasters after being warned of them became the “only source” to stop/prevent these types of terrible events. Has the U.S. Government been successful in stopping terrorism? No. Are terrorists any less powerful now than they were a decade ago? I have no idea. But the fact that I can’t easily figure that out tells me that something isn’t working.
2. The Patriot Act - Maybe the single worst Government intrusion into civil liberties in the modern era. As evidenced last week and countless times before, this piece of legislation has been proven unnecessary in preventing terrorism.
3. The Medicare Expansion - Remember the Republican congress pre-2006? These “limited government patriots” promoted and passed this nanny state expansion. This put us one step closer to the Universal Health Care program that is being promoted today.
4. Iraq War - Everyone should know why this was wrong. From a lack of strategy, to a pointless money pit, this war was nothing but a distraction from many more important issues at home. War and Big Government go hand in hand. War allows Government to grow. If government can’t handle domestic issues efficiently, how can it possibly create democracy overseas and handle national security in an efficient manner?
5. No Child Left Behind - Again, the “limited government patriots” from the Republican Party expanded the size and scope of the Department of Education to exert standards across all states removing a lot of local authority from education.
6. TARP/Bailouts - This continued to set the standard that if you play well with government, you will be rewarded when you make stupid business decisions. Bush, Obama, McCain, Bernanke, Paulson, Geithner and countless others inside of government are to blame for this massive failure of a program. And these central planners still haven’t figured out how to fix the economy.
7. Obama’s Stimulus/American Recovery and Reinvestment Program - From corruption to Recovery.org failures, we still aren’t sure what this massive dumping of money did to fix anything. In fact, we’re not sure how much money was spent. Joe Biden, the head of the Stimulus project, gave us even more reason to have no confidence in government.
8. Election of Obama - This ushered in a continued era of Big Government growth. From Stimulus, to expansions of the war in Afghanistan, keeping Guantanamo Bay open, not withdrawing from Iraq, expanding Government Health Care coverage, this all seems like a continuation of the Bush years.
[...] This post originally appeared at Liberty Movement HQ. [...]