By Dave Racer, MLitt
(NOTE: This is Chapter One of Dave’s new textbook, How Our Government Really Works, expected to be released in the Fall of 2025)
Why should you care how our government works? In fact, maybe you would prefer that government simply leaves you alone.
“Government is run by those who show up.” This quote may have come from President Harry Truman, but the modern application is attributed to “President Jed Bartlett,” the lead character in the West Wing, a popular TV series. It is a fairly accurate statement.
“Show up” is demonstrated in a wide variety of forms. Truman and Bartlett spoke more about activists, partisans, candidates, and their campaigns; the people who attend events, engage in campaigns, and serve in elective and appointive offices. True enough, you may never do any of this, but you can still “show up.” In a country where We the People are sovereign, each citizen should “show up” at some level.
As for you, at this point in life, all you want to do with government is vote in state and national elections; then you would be like many other Americans. “Well, isn’t that enough?” you ask. “I don’t ever plan to run for any office at all,” you exclaim.
Ponder this: 65 percent of eligible voters in 2024 cast federal ballots. That means that 87 million people did not bother to vote. The 35 percent who did not vote reflects the opposite of adults who closely follow national news–about 32 percent.[1]
Here is a frank fact. If our great Republic functioned as We the People designed it in 1787, we would discover that politics and government played only a small role in our lives. In that day, government closest to the people represented a community’s interests; the residents had minimal expectations of their elected officials. Government served limited purposes; what each person could accomplish better as a group than as individuals.
That day of minimalist government is long gone because We the People have slowly deferred to ever-bigger government to provide far more than security to us. In many ways, We the People have become dependent on government, and we pay extraordinarily high taxes for it. More concerning, each time we defer to governments to take over daily obligations, the more of our liberty we lose.
You have a new reality with which to deal. Politics, and the government it continually recreates, is always, everywhere present. To make a list would fill this book.
In your daily walk
Consider examples of what happens when you are not paying attention to government, or if you leave government to others without any of your concern. What happens when you do not know how to separate your liberty and its power, rights, and responsibilities from what government is doing for and to you?
Look at what you are wearing today as you read this. Before you could slip a T-shirt on, pull up your slacks, and tie your tennis shoes, governments at all levels had something to do with your choices.
Did you eat today? Governments are involved in your food choices.
Consider what you are sitting on, the walls around you, lights, heat, or air conditioning, the windows, and everything you see outside the windows.
Are you reading this book on a mobile device? Will you access social media today, or watch a program on television? In any of these interactions, will you view a commercial and, whether consciously of it, decide about a product, service, or event?
Without a doubt, at least one federal or state law, county rule, or local government ordinance has been involved in all these daily events.
Look at your money. Why is $1.00 equal to 100 pennies? What makes a quart 32 ounces? How come the speed limit is 60 instead of 65? Who says you cannot operate a retail walk-in business out of your home?
Who cuts the grass in your parks, or cares for its walking paths, your lakes and beaches, or trims the trees on the boulevards? Who plows the snow (or cleans up after a dust storm, floods, torrential rains, and other natural disasters)?
Do you hunt or fish? If you live in Minnesota and fish for muskie, who decided that in 2025 you could only keep one fish daily, and it had to be at least 54 inches long? If you live in Tennessee, who says you can only take two buck deer in a season? What if you see three or four—and you love venison?
Why does anyone have to have a license plate on their car or truck, or for that matter, a license to get married, cut hair, perform surgery, cut down trees, sell houses or stocks, practice law, or teach in a public school? That is a lot of licenses, and there are dozens more. How does all that happen?
When a fire or a riot or violence breaks out in a city, who shows up to douse the flames and settle down the people? If someone hurts someone else, how is it that they end up in jail or prison, and who decides how long they stay? Why do some lawbreakers go free? Why do some individuals who commit first-degree murder on federal land end up being executed; maybe you oppose the death penalty.
Why is it that voting is limited by age and only for citizens (except in some places now)? And how come we all vote on certain days and in certain locations (except lately, when voters can simply mail in a ballot—and is that safe?
If you are under 19, you are likely required to go to school. Who decided that? Why is the school year 180 days, or whatever it is where you live? Who told your teachers what they must teach and forbid them to teach other subjects?
In some states, some people are allowed to wear handguns in a holster, right out where you can see it. In other states, they must conceal the handgun, and in some places, they cannot carry a handgun at all. Why? Who decides?
Maybe you do not drive yet, but when you do, you will find that not only are there stop signs and stop lights, but there are also distinct kinds of painted stripes on the streets and highways. You will see shoulders or curbs on either side of the road. You will get into trouble driving across an open field to save time, entering a freeway anywhere other than an on-ramp, or driving too slow or too fast. Someone decided where all those roads, bridges, streets, highways, and freeways were going, and often they had to take private land to build them.
Why is it that you do not have the liberty to do whatever you want and whenever you want? These questions and the answers are all the same; governments decide.
Who tells the government what it can do and not do? In the United States of America, at some level or at a point in time, We the People are in charge. It sure does not feel like it, does it?
Voting? Well, if it makes a difference, then “yes.”
“It’s not the hand that signs the laws that holds the destiny of America. It’s the hand that casts the ballot,” President Harry S. Truman said. Is he right? Yes, to some extent, in a country like ours, We the People who show up and who vote are supposed to be able to decide government’s reach and direction, within the confines of the state and federal constitutions.
Knowing when and where to vote and how to fill out a ballot is important; it is also quite easy. Voting itself, however, is far too limited if you value your liberty. The concern goes beyond who gets elected, although that person is vitally important to your sense of what is right and wrong for government to do. If voters elect a person who believes government should do almost nothing, that person will support laws differently from one who believes government should be all-powerful and decide almost everything.
What if, however, while you are not yet old enough to vote, you knew how government is supposed to work, and began to assert that knowledge? Once you can vote, what if you were able to use your knowledge of how government is supposed to work to effect change?
Individuals who complain about what government is doing or not doing but have no idea how it works are at the mercy of elected officials and the professional bureaucracy that administers the laws and ordinances. Since 1789, when the First Congress met, Congress has passed more than 30,000 public laws. These are compiled into the U.S. Code and consist of 54 Titles with tens of thousands of individual sections. More than 180,000 regulations were enacted by the administrative branch to execute those laws. This is just the federal government.
You had better sit down for this. Earlier in this chapter you read how government has made decisions about the clothes you wear. Here are a few specifics, so you can get a feel for the reach of the federal government into your private life.
- Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act governs the safety of children’s products and clothing. It regulates lead and phthalate limits, requires third-party testing, and tracking labels.
- Flammable Fabrics Act. Children’s clothing must not burn too fast, and labels on clothing must show that it conforms with this act.
- Drawstring Regulations. To try to prevent accidental choking, your government regulates hood, neck, waist, and bottom drawstrings. For example, a waist drawstring must not extend more than three inches outside the drawstring channel and cannot have toggles or knots. (Are you checking out yours now? The author always gets his drawstrings knotted; it is amazing he has choked to death yet.)
- Clothing for children under 3 years old cannot have small parts that might choke the child. Well, of course! Any parent would be careful about this, but wait, government has mandated it.
- Other laws. These regulate labeling and advertising of textiles (clothes), labels explaining how to care for the garment, and in California even more.
And you thought your parents and you were smart enough to decide about which clothes you would wear, and how you would wear them.
This single example of federal laws is multiplied repeatedly by states, counties, cities, and various other governmental units.
Do you think it might be valuable to know how our government really works?
[1] Hagopian, Alicja. “The 2024 Presidential Election in Numbers.” News and Information. The Independent, November 7, 2024. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/presidential-election-senate-house-results-b2642817.html.
If you want to keep current on the progress of Dave’s new textbook, email him here.
