Does the Constitution give too much power to the federal government?

When the Constitution was created, the government that it set in place was one with very limited powers, and a set of checks and balances to ensure that it would stay that way. In doing this, the Founding Fathers were attempting to protect the American people by giving power to the states rather than to a centralized federal government like the one that they had just left in Britain. Since then, this idea of a limited government has been meticulously and deliberately expanded by finding loopholes in the Constitution that grant more and more power to the government.

One of the most recent examples of this is the healthcare initiative known as “Obamacare.” Just a few of the many, many stipulations included in the nearly 2500 page document include government regulation of doctor salaries, private or public practice, doctors investing practices, and even the options available to patients for end-of-life services. The last time I checked, the layout set forth by those at the Constitutional Convention was intended to specifically prevent the federal government from doing something just like this: overregulating things it had no business being involved in in the first place.  As per an article from the National Review Online, “Article I of the Constitution lists the various powers assigned to Congress, such as raising an army and protecting intellectual property. Managing health care is not among them.”

David French echoed this idea of the government outstepping it’s bounds by enforcing things it had no power over enforcing when he stated in his article that the government has become “a state far larger and more powerful than the Founders ever hoped, but exactly as large and powerful as they feared.” This is cause for concern in my book, and hopefully for others as well. I really feel that a good hard look into our government is a necessity if we as a country want to keep prospering, and continuing to be a worldwide leader. I don’t mean to say that an entirely new government needs to be put in place, because we’re currently a world superpower due largely to the fact that our government is what it is. I do think however, that there are a lot of things in our government that are quite unnecessary, like the extent to which it is involved in matters like healthcare that should be very much personal, and that with some restructurings here and there in our current system of the way things are run, we could set ourselves up for future growth, instead of the economic downfall that we seem to inevitably be heading towards.