Amend One

The men who wrote the Constitution owned guns, distrusted bankers, and believed taxation without consent was worth dying over. They would not recognize the country operating under their name today. Federal spending crossed $7 trillion per year. The income tax, which the founders explicitly rejected, now reaches into every paycheck you earn before you touch a dollar of it. The Federal Reserve, a central bank of the exact type Jefferson warned would strip citizens of property through inflation, has spent the last two decades aggressively expanding the money supply and handing you the bill through rising prices. The founders drew the federal government's powers in a short, specific list. Congress could coin money, raise an army, and regulate interstate trade. What it could not do is not in that list, because the founders assumed the limits were obvious. They were wrong to assume that. Today the federal government licenses your profession, subsidizes your competitor, dictates your health plan, and surveils your financial transactions above $600. The administrative state, staffed by unelected bureaucrats at the FDA, SEC, EPA, and an estimated 430 other agencies, writes rules carrying the force of law without a single congressional vote. Madison called this precise arrangement tyranny in The Federalist Papers(No. 47). The founders risked hanging to escape a government that taxed tea at 3%. You hand over 30 percent of your income and are supposed to thank the state for the privilege of keeping the rest.