How is a more powerful government better for the American society?

Coupon Organizer

government is extremely powerful now.

it does not need to get more powerful..it needs to become more of a government that serves the common good of the ordinary people and not what it is doing now which is serving the elite few wealthy and the big wealthy corporations.

Marketing Strategies

I’ll let FDR answer:
Whatever his party affiliations may be, the President of the United States, in addressing the youth of the country, even when speaking to the younger citizens of his own party, should speak as President of the whole people. It is true that the Presidency carries with it, for the time being, the leadership of a political party as well. But the Presidency carries with it a far higher obligation than this, the duty of analyzing and setting forth national needs and ideals which transcend and cut across all lines of party affiliation. Therefore, what I am about to say to you, is word for word, what I would say were I addressing a convention of the youth of the Republican Party.
A man of my generation comes to the councils of the younger warriors in a very different spirit from that in which the older men addressed the youth of my time. Party or professional leaders who talked to us twenty-five or thirty years ago almost inevitably spoke in a mood of achievement and of exultation. They addressed us with the air of those who had won the secret of success for themselves and of permanence of achievement for their country for all generations to come. They assumed that there was a guarantee of final accomplishment for the people of this country and that the grim specter of insecurity and want among the great masses would never haunt this land of plenty as it had widely visited other portions of the world. And so the elders of that day used to tell us, in effect, that the job of youth was merely to copy them and thereby to preserve the great things they had won for us.
I have no desire to underestimate the achievements of the past. We have no right to speak slightingly of the heritage, spiritual and material, that comes down to us. There are lessons that it teaches that we abandon only at our own peril.
I say from my heart that no man of my generation has any business to address youth unless he comes to that task not in a spirit of exultation, but in a spirit of humility. I cannot expect you of a newer generation to believe me, of an older generation, if I do not frankly acknowledge that had the generation that brought you into the world been wiser and more provident and more unselfish, you would have been saved from needless difficult problems and needless pain and suffering. We may not have failed you in good intentions but we have certainly not been adequate in results. Your task, therefore, is not only to maintain the best in your heritage, but to labor to lift from the shoulders of the American people some of the burdens that the mistakes of a past generation have placed there.
There was a time when the formula for success was the simple admonition to have a stout heart and willing hands. When life became hard in one place it was necessary only to move on to another. But circumstances have changed all that. Today we can no longer escape into virgin territory: we must master our environment. The youth of this generation finds that the old frontier is occupied, but that science and invention and economic evolution have opened up a new frontier, one not based on geography but on the resourcefulness of men and women applied to the old frontier.
The cruel suffering of the recent depression has taught us unforgettable lessons. We have been compelled by stark necessity to unlearn the too comfortable superstition that the American soil was mystically blessed with every kind of immunity to grave economic maladjustments, and that the American spirit of individualism-all alone and unhelped by the cooperative efforts of Government-could withstand and repel every form of economic disarrangement or crisis. The severity of the recent depression, toward which we had been heading for a whole generation, has taught us that no economic or social class in the community is so richly endowed and so independent of the general community that it can safeguard its own security, let alone assure security for the general community.
It is my firm belief that the newer generation of America has a different dream. You and I know that this modern economic world of ours is governed by rules and regulations vastly more complex than those laid down in the days of Adam Smith. They faced simpler mechanical processes and social needs. It is worth remembering, for example, that the business corporation, as we know it, did not exist in the days of Washington and Hamilton and Jefferson. Private businesses then were conducted solely by individuals or by partnerships in which every member was immediately and wholly responsible for success or failure. Facts are relentless. We must adjust our ideas to the facts of today.
Our concepts of the regulation of money and credit and industrial competition, of the relation of employer and employee created for the old civilization, are being modified to save our economic structure from confusion, destruction and paralysis. The rules that governed the relationship between an employer and employee in the blacksmith’s shop in the days of Washington cannot, of necessity, govern the relationship between the fifty thousand employees of a great corporation and the infinitely complex and diffused ownership of that corporation. That is why we insist on their right to choose their representatives to bargain collectively in their behalf with their employer. In the case of the employees, every individual employee will know in his daily work whether he is adequately represented or not. In the case of the hundreds of thousands of stockholders in the present-day ownership of great corporations, however, their knowledge of the success of the management is based too often solely on a financial balance sheet. Things may go wrong in the management without their being aware of it for a year, or for many years to come. Without their day-to-day knowledge they may be exploited and their investments jeopardized. Therefore, we have come to the recognition of the need of simple but adequate public protection for the rights of the investing public.
A rudimentary concept of credit control appropriate for financing the economic life of a Nation of 3,000,000 people can hardly be urged as a means of directing and protecting the welfare of our twentieth-century industrialism. The simple banking rules of Hamilton’s day, when all the transactions of a fair-sized bank could be kept in the neat penmanship of a clerk in one large ledger, fail to protect the millions of individual depositors of a great modern banking institution. Aggressive enterprise and shrewd invention have been at work on our economic machine. Our rules of conduct for the operation of that machine must be subjected to the same constant development.
And so in our social life. Forty years ago, slum conditions in our great cities were much worse than today. Living conditions on farms and working conditions in mines and factories were primitive. But they were taken for granted. Few people considered that the Government had responsibility for sanitation, for safety devices, for preventing child labor and night work for women. In 1911, twenty-four years ago, when I was first a member of the New York State Legislature, a number of the younger members of the Legislature worked against these old conditions and called for laws governing factory inspection, for workmen’s compensation and for the limitation of work for women and children to fifty-four hours, with one day’s rest in seven. Those of us who joined in this movement in the Legislature were called reformers, socialists, and wild men. We were opposed by many of the same organizations and the same individuals who are now crying aloud about the socialism involved in social security legislation, in bank deposit insurance, in farm credit, in the saving of homes, in the protection of investors and the regulation of public utilities. The reforms, however, for which we were condemned twenty-four years ago are taken today as a matter of course. And so, I believe, will be regarded the reforms that now cause such concern to the reactionaries of 1935. We come to an understanding of these new ways of protecting people because our knowledge enlarges and our capacity for organized action increases.
Let me emphasize that serious as have been the errors of unrestrained individualism, I do not believe in abandoning the system of individual enterprise. The freedom and opportunity that have characterized American development in the past can be maintained if we recognize the fact that the individual system of our day calls for the collaboration of all of us to provide, at the least, security for all of us. Those words “freedom” and “opportunity” do not mean a license to climb upwards by pushing other people down.
Any paternalistic system which tries to provide for security for everyone from above only calls for an impossible task and a regimentation uncongenial to the spirit of our people. But Government cooperation to help make the system of free enterprise work, to restrain the kind of individual action which in the past has been harmful to the community that kind of governmental cooperation is entirely consistent with the best tradition of America.
Just as the evolution of economic and social life has shown the need for new methods and practices, so has the new political life developed the need for new political practices and methods. Government now demands the best trained brains of every business and profession. Government today requires higher and higher standards of those who would serve it. It must bring to its service greater and greater competence. The conditions of public work must be improved and protected. Mere party membership and loyalty can no longer be the exclusive test. We must be loyal not merely to persons or parties, but we must be loyal also to the higher conceptions of ability and devotion that modern Government requires.

Marketing Strategies

“More powerful” is the wrong way to think about it. I take that to mean that it is more coercive. Generally, that is bad for society. If you mean more interventionist, then there are areas where careful government intervention can help. The key is to understand that liberty is not just a case of barring the government from taking away your rights, it is also a case of government helping maintain a civil society that secures your rights. Without some collectivism, we would have anarchy and nobody would have any rights.

I can show you one area where more government intervention could potentially help: health insurance. So much time and money goes into weeding out insurance risks and keeping people off of insurance rolls that society would be much healthier with universal health insurance. The United States has one of the most privatized health care systems among the industrialized world, and ends up spending the most per capita with poor results.

Another area where government intervention helps: stimulating the economy and preventing deflation. Laissez-faire economics contributed to the depression by overproduction leading to deflation. Government can create an expectation of inflation in the money supply to combat this, and this is what is happening now with talk of another stimulus package.

I hope this helps clarify government’s role in society.

Business Marketing

I am an unashamed liberal, but I think the govt. is already too powerful. What we need is to use govt. power for the good of the people rather than a small group of powerful rich people and their corporate greed.

We need more govt. power in the area of oversight of Wall Street, anti-trust enforcement (just enforcing laws that are already on the books), prosecution of white-collar crime (we already prosecute street crime pretty well I think), enforcement of the rights of working people, parents, kids, taxpayers, etc.

The main thrust of the Reagan Revolution was that -any- amount of government regulation of business and finance is just bad! But we have learned through painful experience that a certain amount of regulation is necessary. Too much is as bad as too little, but the right amount is basic to the operation of our system. We need to find that balance.

I don’t have a problem with ‘getting the government off our backs’, but it should also get out of our bedrooms. 8^)

Marketing Strategies

I know you are not looking for this answer, but I have to type it. I am a compassionate conservative and I know how it is worse too. I just feel I am really out numbered anymore because everyone wants a free hand out from the liberals. I am 21 years old my generation is clueless and many of my friends are having many kids left and right and receiving free money left and right. Also did you see that the democrats who are controlling congress want to add a 50% tax increase on gasoline to help create more revenue. Using more tax as an incentive to boast the economy is a complete disaster!

Coupon Binder

Government means forcing people at gunpoint to do things they would not otherwise do. This is good when you are forcing people to not rob, rape, or murder you. It is not a good way to educate people or feed the poor.