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states would not be eager to give additional power to the federal government and limited its power accordingly.
    Unfortunately, the founders did not realize that the time would come when the federal government would approve a federal taxation system that could control the states by giving or withholding financial resources. Such an arrangement significantly upsets the balance of power between the states and the federal government. As a result, today there are numerous social issues, such as the legalization of marijuana, gay marriage, and welfare reform, that could probably be more efficiently handled at the state level but with which the federal government keeps interfering. The states, instead of standing up for their rights, comply with the interference because they want federal funds. It will require noble leaders at the federallevel and courageous leaders at the state level to restore the balance of power, but it is essential that such balance be restored for the sake of the people.

DANGERS OF AN IMPERFECT UNION
    As the founders feared, the federal government has become much too large and much too powerful. It has usurped responsibilities that belong to the state governments, and as a result it taxes and spends far more than it should. The lion’s share of the gross domestic output is consumed by the federal government and its many programs. For a large number of Americans, particularly those who are well-to-do, federal income taxes are their greatest annual expense, in many cases more than double their annual mortgage expense. This is a natural consequence of ever-expanding government. Legislators who feed at the public trough have no desire to curtail that feeding and keep the taxing and spending going. To compound the problem, our government is expanding by borrowing from the futures of our children.
    The obvious problem of mounting debt should inspire our government to unity, but so far it has not. Although each branch of the federal government should bear some responsibility for our overwhelming federal debt, our leaders seem only to engage in finger-pointing and passing the buck. They need to understand that they all have different roles to play but that they are on the same team.
    Our government can be compared to the game of chess, where on each side there are several kinds of pieces that move in different ways but are all focused on the same ultimate goal. I was on the chess team both in high school and incollege, and I learned a lot of strategies that combined the strengths of different pieces to win the game. Failure to understand these strategies frequently led to a stalemate or a draw when in fact there was plenty of firepower to win the game. Similarly, unless both parties and all branches of our federal government recognize that we have departed from the original intent of the Constitution and work together, true union and its attendant freedom and prosperity will be a distant reality.
    Under an imperfect union, we have steadily increased the diet of taxpayer money and grown the government to an unmanageable and inefficient size. The federal government constantly attempts to control every aspect of our lives. Many politicians seem to feel entitled to take our resources regardless of how hard we worked for them, believing that they have the right to redistribute them to other citizens.
    Thomas Jefferson would not have agreed with such ideas; he wrote, “The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property, and in their management.” 1 He and, I’m certain, the rest of the founders would have been horrified to see a federal government trying to regulate the foods that we serve our children or the type of care that we can receive from our doctors, to name just two examples. This is not to say that government shouldn’t play some role in public-safety issues and civil matters, but the Constitution makes it clear that in most cases those things should