College of Political Knowledge

Subject:  American History/US Constitution/Government

Paper #41

For weeks now I have been writing and asking questions about different concepts in the political sphere with the hopes that it will increase people’s attention and knowledge on the issues that they have to deal with daily and especially at election time…..

Recently I had a post about the common good (or in some cases “common cause) and in it I discussed what was meant when you hear pundits and speakers and campaigners use the term and they use it liberally (that is a small “l” and not the large “L”)……..

Let us talk about the Constitution, especially the 1st Amendment Section 8 which states….

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States;……

There is the term that I would like to discuss…”the general welfare”…..we hear this term all the time, well you do if you do much reading or writing on the political side of life, but what does it mean?

First of all we must remember that the days that the document was written there were many ways of saying a thing…..for instance, general welfare could be of today’s equivalent of the “common good”….great huh?  But what does that mean?

Or we could take a different tact……with all the fake concern on the rise of socialism being thrown around by the motor mouths on the Right……we could make the case that ” general welfare or common good” could be interpreted as the Founders saying that they supported a form of socialism…if you use the same vague logic of our Rightie brothers and sisters…….

I mean if you can stretch the facts in today’s world to make the Dems out as some sort of secret socialists then why not extend your thinking and go back to the Founding Fathers on what their agenda was all about?

Equality……a corner stone of socialist thought……just a thought……