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Government was required to drive through major changes such as drives for equality within society, universal education, and preservation of the environment. Mostly in the teeth of big business

There is the world of difference between establishing basic rights and interfering in matters that are best agreed at a community or state level. That is the reason why the states collectively agree to constitutional amendments that can be considered to affect all citizens. However, different communities regulate themselves in different ways depending on both practical needs and the principles they consider to be important. Having the opinions of city-dwellers, who have never got closer to rural life than a nineteenth landscape in a gallery instruct farming communities that they cannot work the land to save a rare frog is absurd. Trying to establish policies such as a minimum wage or the details of environmental protection at a federal level simply makes no sense, as the implications of these things vary wildly between different areas of the country. Equally local attitudes towards issues such as religion, marriage, sexuality, pornography and other issues of personal conscience differ between communities and the federal government has no more business banning prayer in Tennessee than it would have mandating it in New York. These are matters for the states and sometimes for individual communities. The nation was founded on the principle that individual states should agree, where possible, on matters of great import but are otherwise free to go their separate ways. In addition to which, pretending that the hands of politicians and bureaucrats are free of blood in any of these matters is simply untrue – more than untrue, it is absurd. If the markets are driven by profit- a gross generalisation - then politics is driven by the hunger for power and the campaign funds that deliver it. Business at least has the good grace to earn, and risk, its own money whereas government feels free to use other peoples for whatever is likely to buy the most votes. Likewise business makes its money by providing products and services that people need or want. Government, by contrast, uses other people’s money to enforce decisions regardless of whether they are wanted or needed by anyone. Ultimately it is the initiative and industry of working Americans that has provided the funds for the great wars against oppression as well as the ingenuity to solve environmental and other technical solutions to the problems faced by humankind. Pharmaceutical companies produce medicines – not the DHHS; engineering companies produce clean energy solutions – not the EPA; farmers put food on families’ tables – not the Department of Agriculture.