The U.S. Government Must Do Better in Fulfilling its Purposes!

The Declaration of Independence says that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are natural rights. It justifies independence of the North American colonies from the British empire on the basis that in independence they could better secure these rights for their citizens.

The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union establishes that union of the states for mutual defense, securing their liberties and promoting their general welfare.

The Constitution was created "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

Today the United States is among the richest countries in the world and spends more per capita on health services than any other country, yet ranks 33rd in the world in life expectancy. Clearly the government is failing in a fundamental function of securing life and welfare for its citizens. A part of the problem is that the health service system of the country does not focus enough on the prevention and early treatment of disease,; it fails to provide adequate access to health services to a significant portion of the population, primarily the poor. The Affordable Care Act was enacted into law to improve this situation. Obviously it can be improved, and probably will be in the future. However, there should be no question that it represents a legitimate effort of the federal government to more effectively carry out one of its basic functions. In fact most of the act is intended to redirect health expenditures from things that don't improve health to those things that do.

The United States has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. As the graph below shows, the increase in incarceration rate is relatively recent and has no obvious relation to increases in population or crime rates. According to the New York Times, Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

marshals pages of statistics and legal citations to argue that the get-tough approach to crime that began in the Nixon administration and intensified with Ronald Reagan’s declaration of the war on drugs has devastated black America. Today, Professor Alexander writes, nearly one-third of black men are likely to spend time in prison at some point, only to find themselves falling into permanent second-class citizenship after they get out. That is a familiar argument made by many critics of the criminal justice system, but Professor Alexander’s book goes further, asserting that the crackdown was less a response to the actual explosion of violent crime than a deliberate effort to push back the gains of the civil rights movement.

Again, clearly the government is failing in a fundamental function of providing liberty to its citizens, and the law should be changed.

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Returning to live expectancy, as the graph below indicates, it too reflects the racial problems of the United States:

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