A new full-page ad released this month by supporters of the Bluegrass Institute tackles the most misunderstood clauses in the U.S. Constitution.
Politicians and bureaucrats increasingly use the General Welfare, Commerce and Necessary and Proper clauses of the Constitution to justify today’s unprecedented government intrusion into health care, energy and many other areas directly affecting Kentucky’s economy and its citizens’ freedoms.
Click here to read the latest Bluegrass Institute news release.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Don't miss BIPPS' ad on the Constitution in The Lane Report
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Obviously you haven’t bothered to read what our founders said about the general welfare clause. In Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 report to Congress on manufactures, Hamilton wrote:
The terms “general welfare” were doubtless intended to signify more than was expressed or imported in those that preceded otherwise, numerous exigencies incident to the affairs of a nation would have been left without a provision. The phrase is as comprehensive as any that could have been used; because it was not fit that the constitutional authority of the Union to appropriate its revenues should have been restricted within narrower limits than the “general welfare;” [Art. 1, §8, Clause 1] and because this necessarily embraces a vast variety of particulars, which are susceptible neither of specification nor of definition.
And if you’d bother to read Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, you’ll find an all-embracing affirmation of promoting the progress of science and useful arts.
Presumably you don’t consider medical advances as qualifying as a progress of science. Too, the very word “progress” should clue you in to the fact that the clause was intended to be an all-embracing provision. It’s not the idyllic limited government fantasy that you’re so fond of promoting.
It was written broadly so as to be all embracing, as a study of the history of this clause will reveal.
Thomas Jefferson affirmed this concept when he wrote: “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.”
Post a Comment