Here’s the thing. You can always come up with a heartbreaking story of someone who really, really needs that “free money” and would be oh-so-deserving of the $ if anyone would. Just a couple months ago, my sister sent around an e-mail requesting family members to write the legislators of State X, where my niece resides, because funding for Program Abbadabba was about to be cut off in this year’s budget and my niece’s post-grad training depends entirely on continued funding for Program Abbadabba.

There will always be a thousand hands extended for that single budgetary dollar.

And if you allow emotion, rather than principle and law, to drive your decision, as the left habitually does, then you have no grounds to say “no” to the next person who comes along with a heartbreaking tale.

What is government for? What are the respective roles of the federal and state governments in a federalist system? What are the enumerated powers of the federal government acc to the US Constitution?

By God, these are not only *not* irrelevant questions, they are the foundational ones. And they are the very questions that American citizens have not been properly educated to grapple with, thanks to crappy public schools, and have been distracted from even thinking about, thanks to a Weinerized & sensationalist media.

The worse things get, the more simultaneously impotent and tyrannical American government becomes (you wouldn’t think those two things were bedfellows but, shazam, our dear leaders have managed to bring them both to pass in our day and age), the more those foundational questions are going to assert themselves.