The United States of America is a union of countries that teamed up to provide a consistent means of protection from outside threats and give us more economic power, more specifically at the time of the British King George III. We act as a country now, sort of, but we are not a true country, which causes much of the confusion and recent distress in politics. The proper role of the U.S. government is to stay out of the way of the American people. Federal government programs should be eliminated, the bureaucracy should remain small and limited, and the powers of every branch and political position should remain as is written in the Constitution. The States have or should have as said in the Constitution, the power over what is not specifically written to give to the federal government. The Constitution actually is supposed to limit the power of the U.S. government and give authority to the individual states. Unfortunately, we t
he people and the states have lost sight of this limitation and have invested the U.S. government with much more power than they constitutionally have. For example, one such issue is that Congress is the only group that can write a law, and yet we see that Congress has allowed other government independent agencies to write rules that are then treated as laws, such as The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Great Depression is a large contributor to the power increase of the government when President Franklin Roosevelt created hundreds of new agencies to regulate various aspects of the national economy. World War II increased this even further, as a large increase in military power was wanted and maintained afterward. This created more programs for the government to regulate, and therefore, led to more power over the nations social and economic well-being. (Chapter 11, slide 5).