November 16, 2009 08:13 AM UTC

Who Is "the Government" Anyway?

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• by: morgancarroll

(This ought to bake some “Tea Party” noodles – promoted by Colorado Pols)

It has been fashionable of late to see campaigns and people that run on an “anti-government” platform and then seek to be a part of “the government” they so disdain. But who is “the government” anyway? It is not an “it” or a “they”.

It is YOU.

The Founders of this nation took great pains to create this government. We fought a Revolution, a Civil War, and to this day ask our men and women in uniform to risk their lives defending this historic and unique form of government.

In the famous Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln said, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

In our Declaration of Independence it states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

When you live in a police state, in a dictatorship, or in a monarchy then “the Government” is decidedly not of the people and is most predictably their greatest oppressor.

But in a democratic republic, the government IS the people. And if we say we don’t like government what are we saying? We don’t like or trust ourselves?

YOU choose your candidates, YOU can run for office, YOU can vote, YOU have the right to contact each and every one of your elected officials and tell them how you would like them to vote and why. No one will get their way every time, but this surely beats the alternatives.

I believe it was Winston Churchill who said, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.”

Perhaps we are asking the wrong question.

There is plenty to criticize and much room to improve in every level of our government but perhaps what we really mean is that there are different policies we would like our government to enact or follow. Then let’s just say so and work to make those changes. Let’s talk about what what our priorities should be, good laws, bad laws, and what kind of society we want to be.

But attacking “the government” that our founders created as some kind of evil abstraction is merely an exercise in nihilism, which promotes a disaffected public, and when the public disengages, we are no longer a government of the people, by the people, for the people. In fact at that juncture, all that is left is special interest groups who are paid to influence the system, which can give us plenty to be disaffected about.

In other words, when people don’t participate the whole premise of our American system fails. When people participate and take ownership of their government then we are living the promise of the American Dream — a process of becoming a “more perfect union.”

As contemplated in the preamble to our U.S. Constitution, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”