I’m not much on debate threads, but this is the best place for this question/poll. I do not claim any political affiliation (I’m not much on politics even though I know I should be).
People are constantly saying, “The gov’t has no right doing something, something” or “Why isn’t the gov’t doing something about something, something”.
What things do you think the gov’t should and shouldn’t be involved in? Also, which level of gov’t (Federal, state, local) should be involved, if at all.
Examples (feel free to add):
Personal choices (abortion, marriage, etc)
Censorship (any media)
Personal disasters (homelessness, welfare, food stamps, etc)
Please note your affiliation (if any and if you think it’s relevant.
“Ensure Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Government has no business in personal choices (though I’m not convinced abortion is always a personal choice - i.e. after a certain time of pregnancy)
Government should not engage in any censorship of expression, but things like libel, scamming, incitements to crimes should probably be stopped. (national securiy issues might be excepted, but should there should be strong guards against misuse - because it’s such a hard thing to prove).
IMO the government is there to prevent suffering of the people, and to raise the ‘standard of living’ of the people. That means things like enforcing laws against fraudulence and thieving, but also supporting/founding roads and public transport or social security.
My affiliation is a combination of liberal and socialist. I’m a european, so my definition of the terms is probably different from the american ones.
IMHO national government should be concerned with defining justice, law and order, defence, immigration, national infrastructure, and regulating regulatory bodies. It should also be responsible for responding to major disasters (q.v. Katrina) and managing a basic safety net for its citizens - unemployent assistance, emergency healthcare. It will need taxation to fund this.
Local government should be about implementation of law and order, protecting children - including ensuring they get an education, maintaining infrastructure, emergency planning, local emergency services.
I think the government should defend itself from foreign aggression. I don’t believe that we should make pre-emptive strikes or engage in pre-emptive wars. Our system of justice assumes innocence unless proven guilty. (I don’t like ‘until’, since for me there is an implication that the defendand will be found guilty. Just a semantic point I don’t feel like debating.) We should not take action until the guilt of another nation has been proved.
The governments should take care of infrastructures. We need roads, bridges, railways, water, power, etc. in order to make the country work.
Citizens should be taken care of. (You all know that I’m in favour of National Health Care.) Health care, assistance (including training programmes) when jobs are lost, and education are all important parts of ‘promoting the General Welfare’.
It must develop and maintain peaceful relations with other countries. Jesus said we should be kind to our enemies. We shouldn’t be patsies, but we’d have fewer enemies if we would strive to see other’s points of view. I believe diplomacy instead of military might is a better way to ‘ensure Domestic Tranquility’.
We should not have ‘tyranny of the majority’. We have prohibited the federal government from establishing a religion. I believe most people who are Anti-Choice hold that opinion because of their religious beliefs. If laws are made that infringe upon a woman’s right to choose, then those laws can arguably be said to be religiously-based and therefore an ‘establishment of a religion’.
I believe at this point the nation-state is antiquated and obsolete. Culturally different countries won’t disappear, but we need a stable world government with very limited governance of people’s daily lives while ensuring some fair standards of commerce. In this regard national governments should not be dedicated to defense, as there would be no national government to defend. It should be jurisdictional much like state governments in the US are. So we’d have Local, State, Federal and World. In this regard I think the Federal Government needs to have much of it’s power removed, and I think this is kind of happening naturally as corruption is revealed.
I think local governments should have the greatest involvement in people’s lives. If we are to have such things as drug laws they should be governed municipally rather than federally. The Federal government shouldn’t be able to blackmail state and local governments into submitting to overarching social restrictions by threatening to withold federal aid for roads and such.
However, at the same time as we scale back the federal government, I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to a reasonable federal transit system, like a federal rail system or something. I think transportation should fall under the federal perview.