Er, why?
At the very least, permitting a corporation or a PAC or a labor union to have unlimited contributions to elections, based on their right to free speech, is essentially making our government another asset of the Fortune 500 and public employee unions.
Ok, as a counter-point to this: how involved should the government be in the voluntary transfer of funds of one private entity to another?
I think you're approaching things from a viewpoint already accepting the validity of big-government — in the case of what the Constitution actually provides for, 95% of the federal government shouldn't exist and it would lack the power to intrude so much into daily affairs. This is to say, that properly constrained by the Constitution, government wouldn't be big enough [or powerful enough] for the corporations to buy.
Or, more simply:When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
— P. J. O'Rourke
This is a big reason for the shape we are in now.
Because people accept assertions that what the government does is valid; because they accept transgressing the Constitution; because they have been brainwashed to think that there ought to be a law
and the government needs to be a the major presence in their lives.
And also a big part of why the rest of us are essentially invisible to our government, except for the taxing authorities and whichever agency regulates the industry we work in.
I'm not saying that there isn't a problem here; but the reality is that if the federal government were constrained by the constitution virtually all of that regulation would be non-existent. The big-corporations and political-unions are only powerful because they buy and sell favor via government power, strip these powers from government and you strip them of their influence.
I will agree that if the government has too much power, but I have to confess exasperation that so many people, just as smart as I am or smarter, refuse to recognize something simple.
The government grew to this size and power under THIS constitution and with processes that have been in place since 1789. It took some disastrous amendments and court rulings to get here, yet this constitution has been unable to prevent our nation from being on the edge of full blown tyranny.
If the current constitution doesn’t provide for 95% of the government we have now, how did we end up with it? Was there another system in place? What is your explanation for how we got the 95% of the government we should not have under any plain reading of the supreme law of the land?
And no, I do not accept the validity of big government. I’ll go you one further; at this point, I no longer accept the validity of the document and processes that permitted that big government to happen.