[blacksmoke]

"The Congress shall have Power To ...make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."

This is where that jack-assery comes from. While it is obvious that the constitution was written in a time way before mass migration from Europe (in terms of numbers that we saw in the late 19th/early 20th century) the original citizens of the colonies had wide open territory to farm, hunt and "exploit." Once the population became that of an industrialized European hemogeony, life changed to the type we have today. Citizens slowly became dependent on the gov't, gov't was happy to provide, and now a good deal of Americans expect gov't to step in to handle many of our problems. In a true constitutional democracy like we had for the first hundred or so years people simply took care of themselves and their neighbors and that was that. There wasn't much need to collect taxes and support a police dept. when a posse of armed citizens could get together and defend themselves. After the industrial revolution, urbanization, much higher rates of immigration, we got ourselves here.