Big Government and the Ninth Amendment

   The Tea Party lacks for a lot of things. Number 1 is the intellectual basis for arguing why government should be smaller. "Government should be smaller!" the T-Partiers chant, but their argument is that we can not afford it any longer, as if to say, "If we had all the money in the world, we'd be ok with 'big' government".
   Big government ought to be big, if the big problems of the big world call for it. There is nothing wrong with big government so long as it is Constitutionally doing what it ought to be doing, not doing what it ought not be doing, and that what it does that it 'ought to' can be paid for.
   Therein lies the problem. More than 100 years of Progressivism have given rise to the idea of "positive liberty", e.g., entitlements. These are not simply things like food stamps and health care, but also government mandates on hair dryers--which save about 12 lives a year at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars; the mandated demise of the incandescent light bulb so that America doesn't have to build any new nuclear reactors--which are very safe and extremely cheap when the they are allowed to be pebble bed modular reactors; but nooooo, those are not allowed, even while the start-up of such companies as could build them would instantly put tens of thousands of people to work.
   Government mandates are costing the people of this nation hundreds of billions of dollars a year in subsidies, including those for bio-fuels, which as we all know by now are pushing up the cost of fuels, the cost of our food, and are not popular, not to mention that the price of biogas must be something like 24¢ less than regular before it actually becomes more fuel-efficient, because you get fewer miles-per-gallon with it.

   Negative liberty, on the other hand, is the absence of political obstacles and constraints against individual sovereignty, which the Founders sought to guarantee with the Ninth Amendment.

   The Ninth Amendment says that just because the Founders failed to name and to number all the specific rights you have, doesn't mean you don't still have them. The right to a hairdryer that won't kill you if you are stupid enough to use it near water isn't one of them.
   The Tea Party has turned out to be a very vocal group of fiscal and ethical conservatives, which could be good for America's wallets and America's disdain for corrupt politicians, who until now have mostly gotten away with their indiscretions.
   But the Tea Partiers are no more Originalist readers of the Declaration than are their Republican or Democratic counterparts, and therein lies the problem: we need Constitutional Originalists to separate the unConstitutional government from the Constitutional government, not the "big" from the "small" government, because in the end those who call for smaller, or for less, government still fail to remember the reason that a government that governs less governs best: isn't because it's fiscally smaller, it because it is further toward being unable to destroy what is so callously forgotten about the Ninth Amendment.