The magnitude of the "American Dream" is inversely proportional to the size of government

This is a very thought provoking essay. I came from a very lower class parentage; a father that dropped out of school at the age of 13. I not only went to college, but hold multiple advanced degrees. I was quite successful, and now am semi-retired. My kids are doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs.


One might ask "what is the American dream". It is to to aspire to be what you parents never thought possible, but dreamed for you. Government was NEVER the deciding factor in my fate. It was my own quest for what I dreamed. If we lose this - we lose what it is to be an American.


--Rick Williams, comment on Wall Street Journal article "The New American Divide"


Sorry man, but the size of government being what it is, the size of the debt, the extent of our empire--too late.


People who support big government: you support looters. Government cannot make anything.


1. It can take from others through taxes or confiscation.


2. It can print money--paper backed by a promise to support the paper--money based on faith alone, and the federal reserve has an explicit goal of inflation--devaluating that currency to pay off it's debt in cheaper $.


3. It can borrow money in the form of sovereign debt.


The bigger the government, the less the tax paying people get to keep. The bigger the government, the more aggressive it's nationalism and war machine, the less the people have, and the less their currency is worth--the money is printed or borrowed.


Now our government has obligated us to $16.4 trillion in debt, and $60 trillion in unfunded Medicare and Medicaid, public sector retirement funds (already raided and borrowed against, btw): 


What American dream do I have to offer my three kids?  Will they have lower taxes than I? Will my 401k be taxed at the same rate in 25 years as it would be if I withdrew it from the account and paid taxes today?


My hope and trust in the .gov to secure any "American Dream" is long dead. 


I either make it for myself in spite of nearly 50% wealth confiscation, or I don't make it at all.

IF WE look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between society and the State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing, wage-fixing, inflation, political banking, "agricultural adjustment," and similar items of State policy that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can be run up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same thing; which is, an increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social power.


It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power. There is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.--Alfred Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State, 1935


(emphasis added)


These are the reasons I support States' rights, very limited federal government as originally outlined in Article I Section 8, and am particularly interested in the re-assertion of the Tenth and Ninth Amendments.