The preamble to the Constitution states: "We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare..." It doesn't say "guarantee the general welfare." And it certainly doesn't say "give welfare benefits to all the people in the country who aren't doing so well even if the reason they aren't doing so well is because they're sitting on their butts in front of the TV".
This country was founded by religious nuts with guns.
Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.
This country is so urbanized we think low-fat milk comes from cows on Nutri/System weight-loss plans.
France in August when you can travel through the entire country without encountering a single pesky Frenchman or being bothered with anything that's open for business.
Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How'd they get so rich? Because they're free.
Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening.
Maybe it's understandable what a history of failures America's foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America's miniature schnauzer -- a noisy but small and useless part of the national household.
[T]he Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps volunteers? Or maybe the people in Texas were attacked because of child abuse. But, if child abuse was the issue, why didn't Janet Reno tear-gas Woody Allen?
I don't see evidence of America being a poorer country than it was 20 years ago. I've seen impoverished devastation. I've seen places where things had been good and now they were very bad.
It takes a lot of weapons to do good works (as Richard the Lionhearted could have told us). And this is not just a Somali problem. We have poverty and deprivation in our own country. Try standing unarmed on a street corner in Compton handing out twenty-dollar bills and see how long you last.
As long as we are on firm moral ground, as long as we're caring about other people, these are legitimate worries. The minute that we start protecting our own interests in the name of these worries and saying, "Oh, we have to make sure that only Ford Motor Company manufactures cars, because we can't be sure that the cars in other countries are being made quite up to our point of view," we're economically off base, and, of course, we're moral hypocrites, too.
Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen.
Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who's out in front of nobody? Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.
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