On The Federal Government Only Running Military and Post Office

I’m grabbing a late morning coffee at the Dunn Bros in downtown St. Paul. Like all Dunn Bros, this is a great place for eavesdropping (surpassed only by the Nicollet Mall location).

The gentlemen next to me are have a very in-depth political current events discussion. Considering the low number of good coffee shops between here and the Capital, I suspect politics is their day job.

The gentleman in a blue tie is going off on both parties and doing a fairly decent job of articulating the seeming contradictions in their respective positions. Though he completely misses the parenting-style analogy in George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant. After this, Blue Tie declared the federal government should run the military, the post office, and that’s it.

I’m not comfortable with how short his list is, so I’m starting my own. My list makes 2 assumptions:

1. Internally, the Federal Government should only do things difficult for individual states to perform separately.
2. Externally, the Federal Government is the America’s representative to the World.

That being said, I believe the Federal Government is responsible for the following:

• Foreign Relations
• Interstate Commerce
• Protecting America’s Geographic Borders
• Protecting Citizens’ Equality
• Disaster Recovery
• Monetary Policy
• Social Security
• Education
• Health Care

According to the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, this makes me a Liberal Libertarian. Probably because I answered ‘maybe’ to 40% of the questions and the quiz is published by Libertarians.

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