It has become fashionable lately for those in the media as well as the political class to ponder over the question of whether or not our political system is “broken”.  Most recently we have seen this in the course of the debate over whether or not (and by how much) to raise our country’s national debt ceiling.  From the lowliest scribe all the way up to Obama himself, references to “broken” or “dysfunctional” government have been everywhere.

But are they right?  Is government truly broken?  In short, the answer is yes, but not in the sense that liberals would have everyone to believe.

Our federal government is not broken because of any recent events or failure to compromise and “get things done” on anyone’s part.  The breakage came under the crush of everything that has been heaped upon a system that wasn’t designed to carry its present load.

For the last sixty to eighty years liberals have worked to make Washington the epicenter of American political life and the arbiter of whether or not and how anything and everything can be done.  In the process the federal government has appropriated power to itself that it wasn’t constructed to handle, and that is why it is broken.

As far as our Constitution is concerned, the vast majority of what the federal government currently does was never intended to be handled by a single government.  Most of those functions were meant to be handled more locally, that is on a state by state basis.  It is worth pointing out that if the people who wrote our Constitution, living in a country of less than four million people, didn’t trust a single government to handle that much power, why would anyone trust it to do so for a nation of over three hundred million, (let alone think it could do a good job)?  read more »