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By Root 281 0

goes without; the omnipresence of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, where the individual must obey the commands of the omnipotent sovereign; and the Marx-Engels class-based radical egalitarianism and its pursuit of the inevitable workers’ paradise. Over the course of the last hundred years or so, the counterrevolution has achieved significant success. There is no denying that America has become more utopian in character and less republican. In fact, it is more accurate to describe modern America not as a constitutional republic, although it retains certain constitutional and republican traits, but a utopia—an Ameritopia. To the extent this continues, and whether or where it ends, I cannot say, for I do not know.

The Founders would be appalled at the nature of the federal government’s transmutation and the squandering of the American legacy. The federal government has become the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. Its size and reach are vast. Its interventions are illimitable. As I am constrained by time, space, and the human condition, it is not possible to set out an all-inclusive examination of the state of things. However, certain examples, both general in nature and common to daily life, should help prove the point to those who remain open to reason and keen on liberty. If further evidence is desired, it abounds everywhere and permeates everyday existence. One need only make the effort to observe it.

FEDERAL TAXING, SPENDING, AND DEBT

Among the ten tenets in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels include “[a] heavy progressive or graduated income tax” (42). In America, the federal government imposes a staggering burden on a small fraction of taxpayers, as reflected in data released by the Internal Revenue Service for 2008. The top 1 percent of income earners paid 38 percent of personal income taxes while earning 20 percent of pretax income. The top 5 percent of income earners paid 58.7 percent of personal income taxes while earning 34.7 percent of pretax income. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent of income earners paid only 2.7 percent of the total tax burden while earning 12.75 percent of the total pretax income. In other words, the top 5 percent of income earners paid the majority of the total tax burden and the bottom half of income earners paid almost nothing.2

Gross domestic product (GDP) represents the total value of all goods and services produced in the United States in a given year. In 1930, the federal government spent 3.4 percent of GDP. In 1937 and 1939, in the midst of the Great Depression, federal expenditures consumed 8.6 percent and 10.3 percent of the GDP, respectively. During 1943 and 1944, in the midst of World War II, expenditures were 43.5 percent and 43.6 percent, respectively. In 1948, after the war, the percentage dropped to 11.5 percent. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, federal expenditures as a percentage of GDP hovered between 15 percent and 17 percent. During the 1970s and 1980s, these numbers ranged between 17 percent and 19 percent. In the 1990s, the percentage varied between 15 percent and 19 percent. By 2000 and 2001, there was a small drop to 14.8 percent in both years. Starting in 2009, the percentage reached 21.1 percent—the highest percentage of federal spending since 1946.3 And in 2010, federal expenditures jumped to 24 percent of GDP.4

Moreover, at the end of 2008, the federal debt as a percentage of GDP was at 40 percent.5 In 2010, it jumped to over 60 percent.6 For 2011, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects the federal debt will reach about 70 percent of GDP, the highest level since right after World War II, and it will exceed 100 percent of GDP by 2012. Shortly thereafter, “the growing imbalance between revenues and spending, combined with spiraling interest payments, would swiftly push debt to higher and higher levels.…”7

Furthermore, the most recent estimate of total unfunded obligations in dollar terms—for which no resources are currently