> We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, 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.
It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitutional scheme to think that the Framers implemented "limited government." The federal government was indeed constituted as one of limited powers, but it was created against the backdrop of the state governments, which were conceived to have inherited all the powers of the British sovereign, limited only by their own constitutions.
You can invoke the Constitution to argue that some particular policy is better implemented at the state level than the federal level, but it is incorrect to say that this or that end is not the function of the federal and state governments taken together. We live, by design, in a democracy: the ends of government are whatever we want them to be, subject only to the limitations outlined in the Constitution.
I'm more of a Federalist--confusing name for an important concept. But I don't think that's what we're talking about. It sounds like we're disagreeing with what constitutes "general welfare" as you highlighted.
Ok, where do you draw the line in modern society? If you want to invoke the argument "what would the framers have wanted?" then what do you think they meant? Who can limit the definition of "general welfare" now. All you need is a bunch of loud people for any random issue, then it becomes a general welfare issue.
Yes, the state governments should have more power--I assume that was your point.
> Yes, the state governments should have more power--I assume that was your point.
No, my point is that your original statement ("it's certainly not the function of the USA govt to provide anything but what's defined in the constitution") is wrong. That might be true of the federal government, which is limited in scope, but that is not true of the state governments, which are not and were never conceived to be. The state governments can (try to) provide, almost without limit, whatever voters want them to provide.
Since the State (in the academic sense of the word, with capital S) can comprise institutions at multiple administrative levels (eg state and federal), it is entirely possible to have a federal government with limited powers against a backdrop of strong state governments.
Indeed, some legal historians like William Novak have argued that many of today's widespread notions around the historicity of "limited government" and the early republic are largely revisionist myths [1].
[1] http://www.history.ucsb.edu/projects/labor/documents/TheMyth...
That is exactly what the framers wanted from the federal government. Your following sentence directly contradicts your entire point. We're talking about FEDERAL POWERS.
In any case, there's nothing contradictory in that statement. "Limited government" is a term with specific meaning in libertarian and neoclassical circles. It refers to a society in which the government, which may be democratically elected, has a limited range of powers and can only pursue certain ends. In such a society, the majority cannot vote to pursue a particular end if it is outside the proper scope of government.
The framers did not implement "limited government" in the U.S. They created a limited government, the federal government, but only against the backdrop of the un-limited state governments. In the U.S., the "government" (between the state governments and the federal government), can pursue nearly any end that voters might wish to pursue. It is, together, limited only in scope by certain Constitutional rights. The limited nature of the federal government is just a tool to divide power between the state and federal levels.