Limited Government – what does that mean?

When the Tea Parties say they want limited or smaller government, many of our critics try to make it sound like we are against any form of government control. If that was true then the Tea party would be advocating anarchy.

However, nothing could be farther from the truth. What we want is Constitutional government. The supreme law of the land not only explicitly states what the government can and must do but it also clearly spells out what the government is prohibited from doing. As such, the Constitution gives us a government whose power over its citizens is limited and defined.

Unfortunately, that is not the way our government is operating today.

With each passing year, the Federal Government more and more is telling Americans how to live their lives, how to run their businesses, and what they are allowed to do with their own money. With each passing year Congress takes more and more of our money in the form of taxes to pay for more and more programs to care for more and different groups of people.

This is the very reason colonial Americans declared their independence from their mother country, England. Because the amount of government regulation and taxation under English rule had became so burdensome and oppressive and took away much of their freedom, Americans fought a war of independence over the right to live one’s life as they pleased rather than the way their government approved.

But today our government wants to become involved in almost every aspect of our lives and has grown in power far beyond any authority given to it by the Constitution. What the Tea Party wants is for our elected representatives to govern within the limits that the Constitution prescribes rather than through the over-reaching, all-pervasive power that Congress now continually exercises over us.