Hmmm, well, I wasn't trying to prove or disprove anything about economic terms vs. personal privacy; I personally left that whole topic behind about 10 replies ago. In fact, I never was trying to argue that point. In my original reply to Populism2008, I was just trying to point out that - in my opinion - that authorizing terrorist surveillance falls within the president's Constitutional powers, and therefore, the "big government" tag shouldn't apply.
My next reply was in response to your comments about the constitutionality of creating new bureaucracies, entitlements, services, etc.
As for taking it to a new thread, I was fine with letting this die a long time ago, but Pop08 pushed for the whole proof thing, so I obliged. And because I think the power to create all these new entitlements should be a power of the states and not the feds, I argued it the way I did.
So, sorry for the confusion and the thread creep. And now, I am just fine with letting this whole thing end here.
You're missing the very basic logic here. You said you don't consider intrusions on privacy to be "big government" because they're constitutionally permissible. Obviously we disagree on what privacy intrusions are contitutionally permissible or not, but that's not the point: the point is, the debate about big vs. small government is not and has never been about whether or not the constitution permits things. It's a debate about how much the government should do or not do, including a whole range of choices among things that are permissible.
Remember, the point you initially responded to was about the hypocrisy of opposing "big government" social services, but not opposing it when it comes to intrusion of privacy. You answered that it's not hypocrisy, because the constitution permits intrusion of privacy. Even if that were entirely true... the constitution permits social services too! The constitution restrict how much money government can spend or how many people it can hire or how many agencies it can create, it just creates a structure wherein those kinds of decisions can be made.
You presented a bunch of quotes that don't apply. First of all, they're not from the constitution, and you made no attempt to show how anything in the constitution relates to what you're claiming. Secondly, you concentrate a lot about where the separation between the role of federal and state governments should lie. There's a whole other debate to be had there, but it's a different debate! If you believe that "big government" should be entirely handled by state governments, say so, fine. We can disagree about that. But conservatives who oppose "big government" aren't saying "it's fine for the states to do as much of that stuff as they want, we just don't think the Federal government is allowed to do it". Maybe that's your opinion, personally, but it's not what public debate about big government is about at all. Conservatives who criticize "big government" social spending criticize it on philosophical grounds, and they do so at the state level just as on the federal level.
As a tangent, I should point out that the balance of federal vs. state power shifted fundamentally from 1860 - 1940, after a massive civil war proved the old deal was not successful, and a series of constitutional amendments were passed. So making claims about what the balance was before this big shift, or what people who founded the country intended for it to be, does not automatically give you moral superiority about claims for what that balance ought to be today. But, as I said, this is a tangent. It's an entirely separate debate from the one about conservative hypocrisy that this thread started out with.
1. It's not about what's constitutionally permitted, it's about what government should and should not do, even if it's allowed to.
2. It's not about the separation of roles between state and federal government, it's about the role of "government" in general, at all levels.
3. If there are any constitutional prohibitions that are relevant here, they're the ones that address civil liberties. The Constitution doesn't even hint at prohibiting social services, or defining the size of government.
