I am taking a US History class now (as I have some gen eds to take that i skipped in order to finish my degree) and we are leaning of the Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans. My teacher is a Nigerian fellow who seems to hate America and its founding fathers. but whatever.
The 10th amendment is cool. I honestly feel that Obama is trying to fix things the best way he knows how, for the goals of Libertarians and such seem nice, there seems to be a lot to fix before they would ever work.
I like when people say "let the economy fix itself". obviously those people havent lost their job. Either way, I spend much less time reading about politics than you and many others on here, so i try to stay out of the debate too much. But I imagine if states were granted more power, we'd soon be yearning for the days the Fed was in control...
the let the economy people are those free market economists who think the market should operate without much government interference.....it's the opinion of those economists that government tends to mess up markets more than help them. this is evidenced by the government determining which companies are too big to fail, so government lets merrill lynch fail, but bails out AIG. . .the market that was created allowed companies to conduct business (the merits of their business and how the made money is beside the point), and when the market finally turned on them, the government, instead of letting the market decide who survives, the government steps in and imposes it's decision onto the market. that is inefficient, in economics. obviously, in politics, if someone wants to get re-elected, he can't simply say, eh, sorry, that's how the market works (although it would great if there was some honesty), or else he's likely not going to be re-elected.
i simply disagree with "the best way obama knows how" because that means more federal government intervention and interference in the market. on the political side, that is a concern to me because increased government spending and running up deficits cannot continue indefinitely, at some point government is going to have to decide to stop spending, keep spending but print more money (inflation), keep spending and increase taxes (decrease productivity) or keep spending and push collection to the future (inflation and shifts the burden onto future profits and productivity). this administration seems content with the last one for the time being- i have no doubt that, egged on by a democratic congress, they'll get around to increasing everyone's taxes, not just those who make more than $250K, because there is simply not enough tax revenue from that part of the population to cover all of this administrations' spending priorities.
btw, jefferson is the perfect embodiment of the american political pysche. . .keep the federal government small, give power to the states, and let it remain in the hands of the farmers- but, once in office, he advocated for almost none of those things. that's why you have people on the left and right quoting him on different issues.
