I hope you’ve been paying attention lately. The powers of our government have been growing at an unbelievable rate since October, and especially since President Obama was inaugurated. Don’t believe me? How about the massive explosion of spending? Did you know that the federal government has now spent or committed close to 13 trillion dollars to this “crisis” – an amount just about equal to the entire GDP of the US last year. If you were to make a stack of 1 trillion dollars worth of hundred dollar bills, it would be 69 miles high. Now multiply that by 13, and you’ll start to realize how much the goons in D.C. are spending.

Spending is one thing, but even more concerning is the President’s expanding control over private business. Obama thinks he has the right to tell you how much CO2 you can emit. He also thinks he knows what kind of health care you need better than you do. Both of these two intrusions are an essential part of his budget proposal. Worst of all, this week he exerted authority of a privately-owned, privately-run company by firing GM’s CEO. Did you know that the President is allowed to tell private businesses who their leadership is supposed to be? Further, when GM announced their restructuring plan, Obama said no, giving them a few weeks, ordering them to either be purchased by the Italian-owned Fiat or go through bankruptcy. Did you know the President is allowed to determine business deals among companies and even require private businesses to be bought by foreigners? Also, Congress passed a retroactive 90% tax on the AIG bonuses 2 weeks ago. Did you know that the government can make laws to essentially criminalize your activity after it’s already happened? apparently the government is also allowed to determine how much money your job will pay you: ever heard of the minimum wage? Even worse, Congress is now considering a bill that would pave the way for the government to set a maximum wage for every private business.

Everything Obama is doing certainly reveals something about his personal attitudes and beliefs, which we’ll talk about some other time. For now, his actions raise a more fundamental question: how can government do these things? The answer is rooted in the nature of government. At the most basic level, you will never understand government until you realize that government governs. The essence of government is control. If government isn’t in control of something, it wants to be. If it does have some control, it wants more. The constant heartbeat and obsession of government is the accumulation and exercise of more and more power.

We must keep a close eye on government because its desire is for mastery over you. In a literal sense, the end-goal of all government is your enslavement. Its greatest desire is to have power over you in all areas of your life. This is why it is so important to limit government. Like a kid in a toy store, government will not limit itself when given free reign. These are extremely dangerous times because never before have so few Americans cared or so many power-hungry politicians been this active and brazen. Just as you would never trust an alcoholic left alone at a bar, so too you must not trust our government to limit itself.

So how can we stop government from assuming more and more power? Let’s talk about that next time…