[pepsionice]

If you look at the first three or four years of this period...it helped to fund the start-up of the TVA project. The cost of the Army for WW I...mostly paid for.

[henkster]

Oh, I agree, the amendments and the Federal Reserve weren't all bad. Without them, we could not have fought World War 2 and won it the way we did. The formula for victory over Germany in World War 2 was the Allied combination of British science, American industrial production, and copious amounts of Russian blood. Without the fiscal machinery, financing American industrial output that armed our allies would have been difficult, if not impossible. In fact, one of the salient reasons Germany lost is that our industrial capacity was great enough to arm our own forces lavishly, while also arming and feeding our allies. The Germans could not adequately equip their own forces, and their allies were given hand-me-down junk. And the Germans wonder why the Romanians ran away from the T-34s. They knew the ineffective 37mm PAKs wouldn't knock them out.

The problem is that once the federal government started consuming money, it became like a crack addict. It kept using more, and growing more. It would not have been possible without the two Amendments and the Federal Reserve. Only a vigilant electorate could have prevented it, but the electorate has never been particularly vigilant.

As for the "big government" liberals; those who have welcomed the growth of Leviathan, try this on them:

Ask them if they know how many people were killed by human action during the 20th Century. That includes war, genocide, homicide, traffic accidents...everything. The answer is anyone's guess but I'll go with 200 million as a nice round number.

Now, of that 200 million, how many of them were killed by a person acting in some official capacity as an agent of the state?

The correct answer is "almost all of them."