Role Of Government In The United States

Role of Government Paper
The true role of the government in the United States has been a long and well fought out debate that has lasted for centuries, ever since the Founding Fathers created this country upon the ideas of liberty and equality. Obviously, different people have held different views and ideas about this topic throughout the years. Henry David Thoreau wrote, in his Resistance to the Civil Government, “That government is best which governs least” (Thoreau). Two very important groups of people that this nation has been built upon are the Transcendentalists, who believed that it takes more than using scientific evidence and the senses to understand what is going on in the world and the Robber Barons, who changed the way the economic

The Robber Barons wanted to make money through any means possible, and it was because of this capitalist attitude (an attitude that always wanted even more) that allowed them to change how the economy worked. Some of the means that they used, are considered corrupt by people today, as well as by the people of their time. If the Robber Barons were using means that could be considered questionable, they wouldn’t want a government that would come in and stop what they were doing. In How the Robber Barons Railroaded America, author Michael Kazin mentions that the Robber Barons “resisted installing air breaks and other devices that would have sharply reduced the toll of maimings and deaths” (Kazin). Considering there was a large amount of people being killed from working at these factories, the Robber Barons wouldn’t want a government that was involved enough in the economic matters of the nation, to found out what was going on in their factories and have them shut down, because then the Robber Barons wouldn’t have been able to make their precious money. The Robber Barons believed in a “hands off” government also known as the Laissez-faire. Some people might argue that some Robber Barons would want a government that was involved in the economic matters of the nation, because they could receive subsidies from the government, but what these people fail to see is some of the most successful Robber Barons, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, were denied subsidies from the government. In Bankrupt Myth of the Robber Barons, Sean Grindlay states that the successful James J Hill, “received no such subsidy yet built a railroad stretching from St. Paul to Seattle” (Grindlay) He also mentions that “the line operated more efficiently than its subsidized counterparts and