“I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” – Thomas Jefferson

Wealth redistribution via the government is nothing new.  Thomas Jefferson, however, viewed this not just as a problem in the eyes of liberty, but as a problem with government.

In order to run distribution programs, you need more government bureaucrats.  To pay these bureaucrats, you need more revenue.  This means raising taxes on the hard working contributors of society.  The larger the government is, the more expensive it will be to maintain.  The real problem, however, is that the larger the government is, the more powerful it is.  The more it can get its hands on, the more it will get its hands on.  People don’t only have their economic freedoms taken away, but also their personal freedoms.

With a federal government that is a great many times larger, more expensive, and powerful than in Jefferson’s day, we have to ask:  If Thomas Jefferson thought that government was too big in his day, what would he think of the colossus that is today’s Federal Government?