This is a rush transcript from "Glenn Beck," March 10, 2011. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO, GUEST HOST: Does the government work for us or do we work for the government? Would you own, invest in, or voluntarily patronize a business that operates the way the government does.
Tonight, the government and fear.
What's wrong with the government? What's wrong with the government is that we have come to expect too much from it. It takes too much of our wealth and suppresses too much of our freedom. It recognizes no limitations on its own powers and it believes that just because it does something, whatever it does is right and proper. It's too big, stops too much wealth, has a monopoly on forests and it's ever growing.
Beginning about a hundred years ago in the so-called Progressive Era, the government at every level in America began to intrude upon the lives of ordinary Americans. With popular support during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the federal government began to decide what food was worthy of consumption, what goods private trains and trucks could carry from manufacturer to market. What salaries employers had to pay their workers. What criticism of the government was acceptable in public. How U.S. senators would be elected. How much of your income you could keep and whether or not you could consume alcoholic beverages.
None of those powers was granted to the federal government in the Constitution. So the feds either assumed those powers for themselves while defenders of freedom and night watchmen of the government were asleep or they amended the Constitution, as in the case of prohibition, the income tax, and stripping the states of the power to choose the United States senators.
They sold this package of big government to the public by calling it progressive as if to suggest that this was progress. I like Professor Thomas Sowell's explanation of that word. He's remarked that the progressive income tax is progressive the way a disease is progressive: the longer it's around, the worse it gets.
These days in Wisconsin, elected representatives fled the state for three weeks effectively preventing the legislature from doing its work. Unions mobbed the State House and prevented those representatives who did show up for work from getting to work. When the police were called, they refused to remove the demonstrators siding with their fellow union members.
Could you imagine any of that happening in the world of private enterprise? In Florida, legislation has been introduced to permit toll takers at toll booths on state highways to refuse to accept cash in any form larger than a $20.00 bill. So if you give them a $50.00, they have the power to stop and question you about it. Would you patronize any business that treated you like that?
And, of course, in Washington, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked. It can't agree on a budget. It has us in perpetual debt. The vice president is supposably in charge of bringing both sides together and he just took off for Moscow. You can't make this stuff up.
So Congress just spoon feeds the president enough cash to operate the government for two weeks at a time. Last month, the president borrowed $223 billion just to pay interest on the old debt and to run the government. Would you invest in a business that proposed to operate like that? Of course not.
What is the common thread here? As I said earlier, it is government's monopoly on force. It is compulsion. It is that there is no way around the government. It is that you can't compete with it and you can't avoid it. The children will show up at lousy schools and the taxpayers will continue to fund them because the government forces us to pay for these schools and folks don't have the money to send their kids anywhere else.
This is the problem with government. It can't compete. It doesn't produce wealth. It only owns what it has forced from us, what it has taken from us. We cannot escape it. And it knows all that.
If government had to perform in order to be worthy of our taxes and our fidelity, it would collapse. If we have the right to reject it and purchase the so-called services it offers from other sources, it would go out of business. Only competition which induces the fear of failure will keep government honest. But the government doesn't know this fear because it won't let anybody effectively compete with it because the government outlaws what it fears.
At the end of the day, the government should fear us. Jefferson understood this well. He said that when the people fear the government, there is tyranny. But when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
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