Do you have any specific examples that aren't the latter?
That sounds facetious, but I'm being serious. Go read the United States Code, or the Code of Federal Regulations, and tell me how many of those laws and regulations you think really are within the limited powers granted to the Federal government by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Go read Supreme Court decisions like Wickard v. Filburn or Kelo v. New London, or for that matter even Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade, and tell me whether those decisions really are in accordance with the limited powers the Federal government is supposed to have.
Yes, you can argue that some of those laws and regulations and decisions were good from a public policy standpoint. (Although it would be hard to make a case that our public schools are really any better more than half a century after Brown v. Board of Education than they were before. And not everybody agrees with current jurisprudence on abortion.) You can also argue that some of them plainly weren't. (Is it really a good idea to restrict what a farmer can grow on his own land, for his own use, in the name of regulating "interstate commerce"? Is it really a good idea to have the government artificially manipulating the market for food in the first place, especially when it's being done at the behest of large corporations and their lobbyists? Does evicting people from their homes and handing the land over to a private development company really count as a valid use of the government's eminent domain power?)
But in either case, you're arguing from an implicit assumption that the government is supposed to fix problems, and you're arguing about whether it did a good or a bad job. Nobody ever even asks why the government is intruding in all these activities in the first place, if it's just supposed to be enforcing the basic rules needed to have a civil society.
Thank you, I was genuinely curious as to what you had in mind -- I came up with a lot of possible examples, hence the question.
I think it's going to come down to definitions unfortunately. For example, what do we mean when we say
> enforce the minimum basic rules that are necessary to have a civil society
One could argue that Brown v Board of Education had little to do with policy and more to do with basic rules for civil society. For your other examples, I can see compelling arguments for why the federal government took this actions (with a justifiable reason). Many of them fall under the fact that the government is ultimately a forum for resolving large scale organizational challenges that the market is not properly incentivized to tackle.
Yes, these powers can be abused, and while restricting the government from acting in certain ways may be a method of curtailing those abuses, it would be a tradeoff in terms of the government effectively being able to accomplish its purpose.
> But in either case, you're arguing from an implicit assumption that the government is supposed to fix problems, and you're arguing about whether it did a good or a bad job. Nobody ever even asks why the government is intruding in all these activities in the first place, if it's just supposed to be enforcing the basic rules needed to have a civil society.
It builds down to a tension between "fix problems" and "enforce basic rules needed to have a civil society." Even in the situations you cite, the two can be in conflict. I suspect a lot of the people that one perceives as trying to use the government to "fix problems" may very well be seeing themselves as "enforcing basic rules needed to have a civil society."
