I am not sure how you don’t see that I have shown you that the Founders would disagree with you on the unlimited power of the Federal Government? The Founders firmly believed that a limited Federal Government was essential in keeping government small and unobtrusive. The tenth amendment was written to ensure that States were given all powers not delegated specifically to the Federal Government. James Madison, who wrote the Constitution, explicitly stated that he didn’t believe that the Federal Government should be spending money on education – “If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress…. Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America.” If that doesn’t show you that the Founders believed that the Federal Government shouldn’t be spending money on things not delegated to it – like education – then nothing will. Madison argues explicitly against your concept of “Just because our founding document . . . doesn’t specifically give the right to something like public education doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good idea.” We could debate the merits and demerits of public education versus market education and we certainly could both make good points. I argue that the market would create a better educated citizenry. That is a separate debate entirely.

On the matter of the government protecting us and providing a safety net – First, protecting us from others’ intrusions upon our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness – YES. The government exists for that purpose. The government protecting us from ourselves – NO. If I want to take drugs, then it is not anyone’s business but mine, including the government. When my drug taking causes me to commit a property crime or intrude on someone else’s life, liberty, or property, then the government’s role is to step in and arrest that person. Government should have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I wear a seatbelt in my vehicle or not.

On the safety net – I agree that the government is mandated to provide a safety net. Our current safety net does absolutely nothing to encourage non-dependence on government, however. The safety net, as envisioned by the Founders, was a life-saving device to allow someone to live in bad times. No one should be able to live comfortably who is on welfare. It should be so bare bones that it drives a person to productivity and work lest life be lived miserably. For all others, I will choose which charity I give my money to help people.

i personally went to a private school and received a pretty good (though not what i would in hindsight call first rate) education. my parents paid nearly 20k/year k-12 for me to go to school, and having looked into teaching after graduating from college i can tell you that wages at that school were less than ample. your idea works great in middle class, well populated areas, but the people who really need public schools are in poor urban or rural areas. lets look at a poor rural area in, at random, rural eastern tennessee. the population density just isn’t high enough to support a private school, there’s absolutely no financial incentive to start one in the backwoods with only a few people in the surrounding commuting area. this means children have to a) travel long long distances every day, b) board (expensive and separated from their parents), c) pick up and move to a different, already populated area (crowding it, and creating large unpopulated expanses), or d) just don’t go to school. given these options, my personal fear is that rather than move, a lot of people would just not send their kids to school. now in this scenario we have a lot larger portion of people who are uneducated and cannot produce in fields they might otherwise have been able to. there are a lot of jobs they cannot do, and as is the case with farming, many of these low skill, manual labor jobs are becoming automated and outsourced. where would we put this new caste of uneducated poor which we would have created? I feel it is a case of looking for your own personal long term gain vs. short. the relative equality of opportunity we have enjoyed in recent decades in this country has been a great aid for the stability of the nation. i’m no historian, but most of the problems i can think of off the top of my head are due to inequality between races, genders, castes, or what have you. that stability then brings with it a better chance for each person to earn a comfortable living which in turn creates a larger consumer base for you to market whatever it is you do to, and fewer desperate people against whom you need to protect yourself (for examples of this take a look at the middle east!). This is why i think that the clumsy and poorly run public education system is necessary for my very own personal benefit, even though I never actually used the system myself.
Also briefly, i guess your governance belief system stems from the idea that the constitution is necessary (agreed) and sufficient (disagree) to run the country. Just because our founding document (the adaptation properties of which i entirely agree with you about) doesn’t specifically give the right to something like public education doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good idea. I agree that submitting to the most efficient governance lands us in Brave New World, and that a line must be drawn somewhere, but i disagree with what i take to be your insistence that we forsake any option that could help make everyone’s life better solely because of a semantic imposition on freedoms.

First, the federal government does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, with impunity. It spends money on anything it deems important (and when I say important I mean whatever will help them get re-elected). The government can adapt within the current system. However, it will only adapt when they see a political benefit to do so. So the plasticity of government that you wish for is there, for better or for worse. The question then is: What are the reasons, principles, and authorities that our federal government uses to exercise this plasticity. By design, changes to the federal government can be made by amending the Constitution. But the Constitution is difficult to amend by design. It controls our Federal Government, which, also by design, has very explicit and stringent limitations placed on it by the document. The Founders did not want a federal government so plastic that it could react to the slightest blip on the radar (like high gas prices, a natural disaster, etc.). So through the amendment process, the government can legally and Constitutionally change its mandate or its authorities.
What happens now, however, is completely different. Congress and the Executive see something they like and ‘shazaam’ money is spent on it. You cannot look at the folks in D.C. and believe that they do anything but what is politically beneficial and expedient (Yes, there a few exceptions, but not many). So, when Senator X says that the people in my state will vote me back in office if I get them money to do Y, or I will be able to get some national face time on the news if I support Z, then the Constitution be damned if it doesn’t explicitly authorize me to do it. The General Welfare Clause does not, as verified by the author of the Constitution, grant the authority to spend money on anything that anyone deems to promote the general welfare.
A good example would be federally funded education. Never in the U.S. Constitution is the word education mentioned, yet somehow our federal government has gotten into the business of education with billions and billions of dollars. Where does it derive that authority? It cannot be from the U.S. Constitution. It is simply a case where many people think it is a good idea, so let’s do it. I ask you – if school was not paid for or mandated by the government, would your children be uneducated (you could certainly spend the money you pay in school taxes on education)? Schools, like anything ever put to the market, would be affordable, accountable, and much higher quality than if run by the government. You must agree that most everything touched or run by the government is inefficient and second-rate.
You seem to be like most folks where you don’t want the government running your entire life, but don’t mind it running some of your life or controlling parts of other people’s lives. The problem is that when you give up that basic ‘dogmatic’ principle of freedom and limited government, you open the proverbial Pandora’s Box. You “maintain that the government’s job is to step in and say, hey, we admit that we have undereducated most of you, but we happen to know for a fact that ozone and other air pollution causes asthma, and smoking causes cancer, etc…, and for the protection of your life, we are going to place a selective pressure on the markets not to prevent, but to informationally [sic] and economically discourage you from doing these things.” I could not disagree with you more. But more importantly, the Founders would also disagree with you.

What Patrick states is the essence freedom. You are free to pursue, with those of a like mind, whatever environmentally friendly energy sources that you please. I am free not to. When you advocate that government mandate that I must use environmentally friendly energy sources as a response to “global warming,” you advocate tyranny. You can try to package it anyway you like, but it is nothing less than tyranny. Unfortunately, I have found that many people of this country have no problem with tyranny, especially when it is tyranny in support of something they believe in – welfare, paying money to victims of terrorist attacks, blackmail of tobacco companies, social security, etc. As stated in our founding documents, our government exists to protect our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Anything else that it does erodes our freedom and increases their power. And for those who love being free, that is a bad thing. Someday, everyone will face a time when the government and those busy-body do-gooders will fix their sights on something you hold dear, and you will then understand the power and evil of a tyrannical government.

If you and others of the radical left (your term, not mine) wish to explore and develop “achievable alternatives” to the use of fossil fuels, I wish you success and Godspeed. You do not need any federal legislation or the passing of the Kyoto Protocals to proceed.

What I oppose is the political agenda that drives the global warming crowd. If Gore could enact the energy policy he advocates, it would have profound adverse consequences for the economy and security of the country. That much is reasonably certain. Whether it would reduce the perceived threat from “global warming” or otherwise be beneficial to the enviornment is problematic.

so what you’re saying is that even though there may be evidence that something bad is happening, and that there are already very achievable alternatives to what might be causing something bad to happen, we should not pay attention to those alternatives because we think the radical left are jerks? I’m not saying we stop using petroleum, i’m just saying that if we put a little energy into renewable resources and try to tip the market in that direction, we will undoubtedly be doing some good, and might even be doing a lot.

You cite two reasons why most people do not share Gore’s sense of panic. Let me offer a third. They remain unconvinced. And for sound reasons.

The gobal warming prophets of doom speak as if they understand that of which they speak. Yes, the earth’s average annual tempeture has risen one degree centigrade in the last century. And yes, there has been a marked increase in the release of “greenhouse” gases into the atmosphere over that same time. But beyond these facts, everything else is conjecture. They assume, without proof, that the tempeture increase is caused by the increased carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.

Even if their assumption is correct, a one degree fluctuation in tempeture over a century might well be well within historical patterns. Meteorologists cannot accurately predict next week’s weather. Yet we are to put our faith in the projections generated by their computer models prophesying doom decades into the future.

Despite this less than solid scientific foundation, Gore and his ilk would prescribe a drastic change to our society. Given the recent history of the prophets of doom a healthy skepticism is in order. Remember the dire predictions in the 1970s of the coming ice age? Remember the false preditions of the the “population bomb”?

Forgive my cynicism, but it appears that “global warming” is merely the latest trope invoked by liberals to impose their economic program.

You say that I am hung up on the government using guns to shoot people who make bad choices. Is that not ultimately what happens? The government enforces its mandate through the threat/use of force. Use the response to Hurricane Katrina as an example – private charity organizations were prevented from helping now, so that government response could organize and execute their ill-conceived plan in X-number of hours. Those charitable organizations would have ultimately been shot had they not complied. There are any number of additional examples in everyday life.

No one is free to inflict the consequences of their mistakes on others. Drunk driving is illegal for precisely this reason. There exist in the world true facts, such as the fact that drinking alcohol inhibits reflexes, or the fact that there is a higher concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide now than there was one hundred years ago.

These facts, in turn, must be interpreted by the public in their decision making. The government does have a responsibility to protect citizens from the bad decisions of others, though (i.e. I think I shall kill everyone I see right now).

In the case of global warming, the facts are exceedingly complex, and many interpretations are possible. This makes it possible for different parties with vested interests in particular outcomes to attempt to influence the public and the government by obfuscating the facts. The facts of the case, that global average temperature has been rising, that carbon dioxide concentration is increasing, and that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, are clear.

It doesn’t matter what you believe. It matters what the facts are. That’s what I mean by accurate information. And the people to provide it are those with the most expertise or research–whoever that may be. There is no reason, though, that I should suffer for the mistaken beliefs of others.

As a note, you seem to be hung up on the government’s guns. I do not advocate the government shooting people for making inefficient choices. I advocate better information and policy to improve the situation.