Government exists for the sole purpose of enforcing God-given rights of the individual against those who would not honor them. Sometime around the 1960s, government decided that it's sole purpose is to protect big businesses and around the 1980s, realized that their additional purpose is to help get taxpayer money into the pockets of big business
What happened was the Cold War. America came out of World War II triumphantly on top of the world, but having just defeated three nasty totalitarian regimes, it had no desire to have to have to go back and defeat a fourth one, namely the Soviet Union. Besides which, the Russkies had managed to steal the design for atomic weaponry from us, and ergo, the world simply could not afford another major war, especially with True Believers In Communism, who were all nuts and couldn't be reasoned with on a rational level. So the only thing to do was deter them from making too much mischief.
So, the government, having literally unlimited cash (we were the only country that hadn't been bombed into oblivion, and the entire world was buying American products from train track to toothbrushes) awarded all sorts of groovy contracts to American companies to develop new and better equipment and weapons, to stay one step ahead of Boris and Natasha. Ergo, Ye Olde "military-industrial complex". At the time (say, 1947, '48 or so), nobody dreamed that the ideological standoff between Us and Them would go on for 45 years. But by the time we won the Cold War and all those failed Communist states went belly-up, that sort of spending had become institutionalized.
The problem was, during that same 40-odd year period, the rest of the world had "caught up", so to speak. Japanese people weren't buying American cars in 1990; American people were buying Japanese cars, just for one example. And, we had also pretty much depleted the national treasury by financing Mr. Johnson's Southeast Asian Conflict, which, let's face it, really didn't give us much return for our investment. Our economy went down while other nations' went up.
But the spending by that time couldn't stop. Washington is like a crack addict when it comes to taxpayer money....it doesn't matter what else goes to hell on a handcar, they
gotta have that money. And every time they run out, rather than scaling back, they borrow more, and raise the debt ceiling. The budget in Washington is like a house with a sewer backup: if the sewage is clear up to the ceiling, do you stop and clean out the house----or do you raise the roof another ten feet to accommodate more? Washington keeps raising the roof. But one of these days, raising the roof won't work any more---the weight of the sewage will blow the walls outward, and the whole building will come down.
But your big question is the first sentence. Great question! I guess the answer is: all of us, through our elected representatives.
Except we are powerless. Our representatives don't represent us; our elections don't elect anybody we want (on
either side...usually it's "the lesser of two evils"), and our entire system has been co-opted by a gang of thieves who are bleeding us dry for their own enrichment and gaming us into believing that what they're doing is "for the good of America". In addition, the propaganda arm of the gang---the mainstream media--- is constantly engaged in a 21st-century version of "bread and circuses" whereby every time the gang does something nefarious and illegal, the media steps in and distracts attention away from it by saying, "Oh, my gosh!!! Did you see that white cop over there beating that poor, defenseless black man with a restraining order and six outstanding warrants who had three loaded weapons in his pocket and was selling the drugs he'd just robbed from the pharmacy down the street to the kindergarten children in the schoolyard, but never mind all that because it's irrelevant, the only thing that matters is that he is
black and the cop is
white, what are we gonna
do about this?!?!?!?" And by the time the fires are out and the shopkeepers in a ten-block radius of the downtown centers of our 30 largest cities have submitted their insurance claims for the merchandise they lost in the looting, nobody remembers the nasty little illegal stunts the government was up to. It's been going on for years.
I wish that was the way things worked, but it's abundantly clear that our elected officials do not listen to We the People anymore as much as they listen to lobbyists who essentially give them bribes in return for setting policy that is preferential to their organizations.
Precisely. And this will only get worse, since they now also know that they don't need our votes. They don't have to placate the population any more to garner votes---they can just run votes off on printers by the millions, run them through rigged computerized ballot machines, and
voilà! They can put into office whoever they want. 2020 was a landmark in more ways than one. One result was that the American People have forever lost the ability to elect their own choices for public office.....that privilege is now controlled by the gang.
Then this devolves into what is essentially a "tyranny of the majority": as it stands right now at any given point you're going to have roughly half the country who doesn't like what DC is doing and this is a big part of why our nation has become largely unworkable. The gulf between people has become too wide to effectively govern the country anymore so I honestly believe that we're in a period of managed decline.
You're right; but what I suspect is going to happen is that conditions will continue to deteriorate to the point that both "halves" of the country will simply give up all hope in the system, choose up sides, and start using force to get what they want. The 2nd American Civil War. Who emerges victorious in that coming conflict, I believe, will largely depend on whose side the armed forces decide to throw in with. If they choose to back those of us who still love this country, want to place it first, and want to salvage everything that's good in it, and at the same time expel the myriad evils poisoning us, we will survive. If they back the crooks, terrorists, whackjobs and anarchists (we all know who they are), we're done for. We may be anyway.