Originally posted by: Craig234
The constitution doesn't address the topic, but gives the government broad powers to act for the 'public welfare'. That's how they designed it. The constitution doesn't say anything about protecting wildlife and national parks or putting a man on the moon; about programs to encourage development of poor urban neighborhoods or having an earned income tax credit, but those are all programs that are fine under the constitution. So is a large (or small) degree of what you call socialism. For example, the choices on tax rates by income.
The term ?general welfare? is probably the most misunderstood and most abused phrase in the Constitution. It was not put there in order to allow government to provide ?welfare? for the people as we know it.
The idea of welfare as we know it did not even exist when the Constitution was written!! It was not until the late 1800?s that modern welfare emerged, starting in Germany
When written the term ?welfare? would have simple meant: the good fortune, health, happiness, prosperity, etc., of a person, group, or organization.
As shown in the quotes bellow the founding fathers would have been entirely against the idea of taking money from one group and giving it to another group.
"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare but only those specifically enumerated."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."
-- Thomas Jefferson (That's a good one since you are always talking about how we should 'take' from the rich)
" I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it."
-- Benjamin Franklin
With respect to the two words "general welfare," I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. If the words obtained so readily a place in the "Articles of Confederation," and received so little notice in their admission into the present Constitution, and retained for so long a time a silent place in both, the fairest explanation is, that the words, in the alternative of meaning nothing or meaning everything, had the former meaning taken for granted.
-- James Madison
In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees who fled from insurrection in San Domingo to Baltimore and Philadelphia, James Madison stood on the floor of the House to object saying,
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
-- James Madison
"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one subject to particular exceptions." James Madison, "Letter to Edmund Pendleton,"
-- James Madison