Our government is out of control. Our elected officials are drunk with power. Every new day brings more and better evidence they are operating under astonishing delusions of grandeur. As a result of this malady, they seem determined to insinuate government into every aspect of our lives.

They have already to a large extent taken over the mortgage industry. They are also (to various lengths) in control of the automobile, banking, insurance, and health-care industries, and will soon (if they haven’t already – I confess my ignorance here) be jumping in to manage the investment, energy, and travel industries (even more than now).

Not content with controlling those major industries, our government also wants to micromanage the smallest, most mundane, and inconsequential details of our lives, all the way from stopping the airlines from charging for carryon baggage, to prohibiting Major League Baseball players from using chewing tobacco.

I’m talking the FEDERAL government. Not local or state governments. Think about that: The Federal Government wants to prevent free adults from using legal products, and stop private industries from charging for services. These are just two examples from the last couple days, and not at all unique.

Regardless of your feelings about certain airlines’ attempts to gouge travelers for money at every turn, the fact remains that in a supposedly free country operating under free-market principles, any company can legitimately charge for whatever service they provide, and users are free to not patronize those businesses who levy unreasonable fees. Similarly, no matter what you think of the demon-tobacco industry, chewing tobacco remains a legitimately legal product which any adult is free to purchase and use (even when chasing fly-balls or stepping up to the plate in the World Series).

The problem is one of power. When people are given (or take) power, eventually they will abuse that power. They will assert their “right” to control others when in reality that “right” is illegitimate and nothing more than an excuse to exercise dominance over our lives.

In short, they do it because they can.

This trait is completely bipartisan. I don’t think Republicans would be immune to the lure of such power were they in control. Indeed, they were in control for a time, and they succeeded in curtailing civil liberties, which they did in the interest of “security”. Democrats operate the same way, removing freedom, taking over private business, and confiscating more and more in taxes and property. They do so in the name of “fairness”. (I must confess to a preference here for the Republican side of the issue, however. Yet I think they have a tendency to go way too far.)

It seems, then, that we the people are stuck between two power-hungry parties seeking to dominate and rule our lives down to the very last detail. What can be done?

The answer is very simple. We only need to understand and follow The Constitution, and elect leaders who do the same. A return to the principles of limited government expressed in that document is the only way that we can survive as a nation. I cannot over-emphasize this point enough:

The very survival of our nation and the future of liberty hinges on a return to small and limited government.

The framers of the Constitution knew full well the tendency of power to corrupt. They were intimately familiar with abuses of power on behalf of, and indeed in the persons of, the government. They viewed government as a necessary evil, one that must be controlled and limited as much as humanly possible.

It has become clear to me that we as a country have strayed much too far from the limitations imposed on government in the Constitution. Local control has too often given way to federal control in return for resources, and in the process the states have become servants to the central government in all but name. As power has accumulated at the national level, the federal government has exercised more and more control over matters that were originally reserved solely to the states, so that now we are all slaves to the national government – a ruler that governs with capricious avarice and an ever increasing desire for more power and more control.

So rapacious has our national government become, that it can no longer even pretend to control itself. I refer here to the lies that slide so glibly off the tongues of those who say that our budget troubles can be solved by more spending and/or taxing of the rich. This is an outright lie. There is no way to solve our national debt WITHOUT CUTTING SPENDING. And I mean REAL cuts, not simply reductions in the increases of spending, or public relations pronouncements of “spending freezes” after running up the debt by trillions more.

We need to elect people willing to make cuts without mercy, so as to return us to that limited and small government. It will hurt, especially as beholden as we have all become upon the government dole. But it’s the only way our nation will survive.

Try as I might, it is hard not to fall into pessimism when I look at the current national political landscape. Our financial situation is dire; our entitlement programs are so bloated; and our current leaders so clearly inadequate to the task, that I honestly and sincerely fear for the future of the United States of America.