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You do not take risks with taxpayer money.

That is one of the earliest things I remember learning in civics class. It is not a lesson taught anymore.

Since government is taking money that belongs to others it is obligated to use it prudently and for only the most essential of purposes—purposes of such magnitude that only government can deal with them. That was elementary education in the US some 40 or 50 years ago.

Risk is what the private sector undertakes. In the private sector individuals are free to choose how much risk they want to take with their own money or their own property.

Not playing to political whims, and faced with market forces that cannot be escaped by the bottomless pocket of taxpayers, the private sector is better in making business decisions. And, without doubt, private sector entrepreneurs are far more successful, than are uninvested public sector bureaucrats, in risk management. But even at that, they make many, many mistakes. The development of new ideas and new businesses is always high risk.

The difference for the private sector is that the money they lose is theirs to lose. In government, the money always belongs to others, from whom it has been forcibly extracted. And, in that taking, the rightful owners are denied its use. They are deprived of security, comfort and dreams. Because of that, justice demands that when money is extracted by the force of law, the only ethical use must be for broad – very broad – public purposes, for which there is no viable alternative.

Frequently, when governmental figures are caught squandering public funds, they point to similar kinds of losses in the private sector and ask why they are expected to perform any better. The answer is simple — Anytime a public servant sets themselves up as being smarter and knowing better than the average citizen – when they impose themselves upon individual citizens with the use of coercion — then surely, the only justification they can have is that they are infallible. They must somehow never make a mistake; otherwise, "How dare they?" "How dare they!"

If you fool with the life of an individual citizen – play risky games with their livelihoods; interfere with their "pursuit of happiness;" take the wealth they have earned — then you better darn well never make a mistake. That is the onus that rests on the shoulders of every public servant, and is the reason public expenditures should involve as little risk as possible.

The whole concept of taxation was sold to the American people based upon the premise that there were some things that only the government could do in terms of national defense, health and safety. Never once did they proclaim that a broad based system of taxation was needed in order to redistribute the wealth. They didn't make that argument because there is no way it would have been accepted by the citizens.

Any time government strays from that very narrow path, it strays from the Constitution and puts liberty at risk. And, as the current times readily demonstrate, they put our entire economy at risk.

There is no need for government to stray from those narrow confines, because most of the excess being indulged in by government, today, can be and often has been accomplished in the private sector at no risk to public dollars.

There was no need for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. There was a perfectly strong and vital private sector financial industry, one which has since been largely destroyed by the inequities of having to compete with the government.

There is no need to invest in companies like Solyndra. Good ideas in the private sector readily attract the capital they need. Bad ideas need public monies, and usually attract the poorest of business people.

There is no need for public monies to subsidize things like wind energy or ethanol. Such subsidies perpetually cripple the viability of the new ideas, while making difficult, if not impossible, the emergence of any better ideas.

Just think how much better off our economy might be, today, if only our government had never strayed from the very narrow purpose assigned it by the Constitution -- a purpose which was really nothing more than a demand for profound respect for the property of the individual American citizen.