Simple Utah Mormon Politics

One of the worst things about history is that the victors get to write it.  And then it gets promulgated far and wide in government schools throughout the land.  One of the most vicious lies ever told about Franklin D Roosevelt was that he supposedly saved the United States with his "New Deal".  After you read the actual facts, you can continue to like FDR's policies if you wish to, but here's what really happened.

Governments are notorious for creating problems and blaming them on the free market. The Great Depression is perhaps the most successful of such scams in the history of the United States, only exceeded on a worldwide scale by the machinations of people like Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, and Adolf Hitler. Caused by government, the Great Depression not only gave the federal government cover for the “benevolent” accumulation of power, but also has successfully (but wrongly) convinced the predominance of Americans that government bureaucrats can take care of our neighbor from afar better than we can from across the street. A greater crock has not been perpetuated on freedom-loving people since Lucifer enticed a third part of the hosts of heaven to rebel against our Heavenly Father’s plan in our pre-mortal existence.

The predominant belief among the Founding Fathers was that the General Welfare clause of the Constitution did not allow the federal government to perform any act or collect any amount of money for whatever it deemed to be the general welfare. That belief, though, was not unanimous among the Founders. However weak the case might be, nonetheless a case can be made, based on the beliefs of such Founders as Alexander Hamilton, that very broad powers are granted to the federal government when it comes to providing for the general welfare. This reality requires us to defend the "limited" view of General Welfare powers not just as a matter of Constitutional principle, because those who make the opposing case do so using the same Constitution and the words of other Founding Fathers. Those who make the opposite case see our "principle" as mere dogmatism. Our case is made much stronger, then, if we can defend the limited view of the General Welfare Clause from a pragma...

Alexander Hamilton at one point in his political career seemed to have held a very limited view of the federal government's powers, believing that such things as "agriculture and manufacture" were under the purview of state governments. Not long after taking such a stand, he advocated the federal government's role in funding such pursuits. Did Hamilton change his tune? It does not appear so. On the one hand, Hamilton seemed to be advocating that the federal government should have no legislative control over things for which no power had been granted to it, while on the other he seemed to believe that it was okay for congress to appropriate moneys to all of the states generally to fund such pursuits, because funding of such endeavors was within the parameters of the Constitution's General Welfare Clause. Just two days before Hamilton was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, he revealed who had written each of the Federalist Paper essays. That day, Hamilton appear...

It is absurd to imagine that the former colonists, who abhored British attempts to continually centralize governmental power over them, would in turn create a federal government that possessed the same abusive powers. Yet this is exactly what some opponents to the Constitution of the United States were fearful of. It was only after careful assurances that the government's powers were limited and that a Bill of Rights would be the first item of business for the new Congress that several of the largest states ratified the Constitution. Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York, some of the largest states in America at the time of the state constitutional ratifying conventions, came rather close to not ratifying the Constitution. They wanted assurances that the General Welfare Clause, as written, did not mean that the new federal government could raise moneys through taxation for essentially anything that the government happened at the time to deem as being for the general welfare. ...

If a court doesn't clearly understand what a law means, the judges always go back to the intentions of those who wrote it. So they should. A law is still the law until it is properly amended. As law, meaning of the Constitution of the United States can be so understood. When we go back to discover the historical context in which the Constitution came forth, its meaning becomes much less ambiguous. Some people refer to the Constitution as a "living" document. It's not--at least not according to the way that people who use the term "living" mean it. Worse than that, the Constitution is virtually dead, because when it is not being misinterpreted it is almost always otherwise ignored. But it wasn't always that way. The Constitution is what the Constitution says. If it is not clear what the Constitution says, then we must go back to what those who wrote it and those who ratified it understood it to mean. It is largely only to those who don't go ...

It is very likely that one's religious perspective of heaven contributes quite substantially to the exercise of their politics on earth. It seems to me that Conservatives, who are more generally focused on earning the rewards of the next life, are not as tuned into the importance of taking care of the here and now as Liberals are. If you're a Latter-day Saint I'm sure you've heard at least one such story before: person quits job and drains savings account because he has become sure that "The Millennium" and Jesus's return to earth are right around the corner, and that all things will be taken care of for him. Regardless of how many of such stories are true, these stories illustrate a potential shortsightedness of members of any religion that think that heaven is more important than earth. Enlightenment thinkers, to include our own Founding Fathers, frowned on such exaggerated netherworld thinking. Instead, they realized that ensuring that everyone has s...