What if...?

What if…?

By Michael Carl

120607

 

            The US has a number of potentially troubling historical developments that need to be pondered in a series of 'What if' propositional questions. Ultimately, it seems, no matter who has been elected or which party has controlled Congress, the U. S. has continued in a set trajectory leading to more government and more control over our private lives. So...     

 

            What if, regardless of your opinion on slavery and the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s presidency resulted in the public’s acceptance of a strong, centralized federal system?

            What if the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890 and supported by Republican President Benjamin Harrison, which gave the federal government power to control the size of corporations, was the first step to a federal regulatory state?

            What if the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912 wouldn’t have made any difference because in one form or the other, all four of the presidential candidates supported some form of progressive economics and government policy?

            What if Woodrow Wilson’s institution of the federal income tax, a policy temporarily employed in the Union during the Civil War, was designed to get Americans used to the federal government intruding in their personal lives?

            What if Woodrow Wilson’s creation of the Federal Reserve Board was in fact the government giving itself the power to control the American economy apart from Congressional oversight?

            What if the creation of the FBI in 1908 was the first major program to give the central government supreme law enforcement authority over the states? And what if the federal government began passing a series of “federal criminal laws” to legitimize what was in fact, an un-Constitutional increase in federal power?

            What if Herbert Hoover was accused of doing nothing during the Great Depression’s early years, but in fact, his unsuccessful economic interventionism through deficit spending was to prepare the American people to accept FDR’s New Deal?

            What if President Eisenhower’s creation of the Interstate Highway System actually resulted in the federal government having the leverage to create a host of federal transportation agencies that gave the government more federal power over commerce, travel and recreation in America?

            What if Lyndon Johnson’s massive increase in the federal government through the Great Society created a welfare bureaucracy that conditioned people to look to the federal government for help and accept a Nanny State?

            What if Richard Nixon’s wage and price controls and his statement that, “We are all Keynesians now” was simply an extension of federal control over the economy and was in fact, an extension of Johnson’s Great Society?

            What if Richard Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency

was simply the groundwork for the federal government giving itself the power to use environmental regulations as the means to control the economy?

            What if Jimmy Carter’s creation of separate departments for education and health and human services was actually the next step of the Great Society and worked to take more power away from the states and expanded federal control over our everyday lives?

            What if Jimmy Carter’s creation of the Department of Energy, allegedly to end our dependence on foreign oil, was in fact a continuation of Richard Nixon’s more liberal environmental policy?

            What if, in spite of all of Ronald Reagan’s libertarian governmental rhetoric, the federal government through regulation, continued to seize more control of the U. S. economy?

            What if Ronald Reagan’s amnesty program for illegal immigrants did in fact condition more Americans to accept the idea of greater numbers of illegal workers in the United States who could in fact, receive federal services tax free?

            What if George H. W. Bush’s willing acceptance of a tax increase was the vehicle for American’s accepting a continuous revision of the truth by the next president?

            What if Bill Clinton’s transfer of technology to the Chinese and to North Korea was in reality an extension of Nixon’s policy of rapprochement of the Chinese?

            And what if Bill Clinton’s technology transfer to the Chinese was in fact laying the groundwork for a build-up of Chinese military power so that when they overtook the U. S. economically, the Chinese would be equal in military power?

            What if George W. Bush’s Patriot Act was in fact a deliberate effort to get American’s to accept domestic spying, increased government intrusion and invasion of privacy in the name of “security”?

           And what if Barack Obama was simply meant to be a caretaker of the continuation of the war and surveillance policies of George W. Bush?

            What if, when Americans go to the polls in 2012, they actually elect Mitt Romney as president? What if it makes no difference socially and morally because Romney’s social policies are identical to those of Barack Obama?

            But…

            What if, in 2012, Americans wake up to the reality that they’ve been lied to and duped for over one hundred years and actually take control of their own country?

            What if in 2012 Americans get tired of feeding a growing federal leviathan and finally elect someone who really believes in the nation’s Founding Documents?

What if in 2012, Americans finally get fed up with federal prying into our personal lives, confiscatory taxation and the massive growth in federal debt and finally elect a true Constitutionalist to the White House?

What if…?

Michael Carl, MA, MAR

Priest, Journalist