I think that what those notorious commies The Founding Fathers had in mind when they defined one of the basic duties of the government as being "to promote the general welfare" was the commons. I think that they, as keen students of human nature, recognized that a society built only on single-minded devotion to self-interest exclusively would be suboptimum, that it wouldn't do as right by everyone as a society with a government that addressed common concerns on behalf of the people as a whole. There's no disputing that the government has gone too far many times, but disagreeing over the proper balance doesn't invalidate what I see as a legitimate role for government in taking care of things that no individual would or could take care of.

It's an odd notion that unless government forced people to be concerned with others at the point of a gun, that it wouldn't happen (which flies in the face of history and experience), or that nobody would fulfill the many non-constitutional functions of the government if the government didn't do it.

I challenge anyone to find a single writing of the Founding Fathers that stated that a major purpose of the new Federal Government was the distribution of the Federal Treasury to the poor and needy. Trying to squeeze the term "general welfare" to mean this is not very effective.

In a similar way, the commerce clause of the Constitution, originally designed to REMOVE state barriers to free trade, was "reinterpreted" to mean that no conceivable economic activity by the private citizen is beyond the control of the Federal government.

If it is agreed that we are "out of balance" as far as the extent of government involvement, isn't it about time we start moving things the other way?