What is the government for? Our government of the people, by the people and for the people, was started to serve the people.

The preamble to the Constitution. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Was actually lifted from the Haudenosaunee (the French called them Iroquois) Great Law of Peace.

It differed from the Divine Right of Kings to rule and to tax and to regulate behavior. Power in the hands of a very few people who inherited their position. God gave the king or lord or higher up dominion, power, to deny their right to deny God.

The First Nations People didn’t have that kind of God and they saw each other as equals. They decided things together. That is the true principle we were founded on.

As with so many human things there was the principle, the ideal, and then there is the practical, the nitty gritty. These men saw each other, fellow white men with property as equals. White men without property could not vote and had fewer rights than white men with property. Black people were slaves and counted as three-fifths of a person.

There has always been a tension in our system between the ideal of equality: the system should run to everyone’s advantage, everybody should have the same right just to live and the government should function fairly. And the reality that some people manipulate the system to their advantage. They create a tax system that does not tax their source of income. Capital Gains are not taxed as income. Elon Musk paid no taxes last year. It’s an accounting trick that keeps us from providing services that we need for our people.

Why do we have any homeless people at all? Many homeless people are working. Remember rent has gone up but federal minimum wage is still $7. We have enough resources to house everyone but some people are hoarding them. We can change that if we can elect more people like Bernie Sanders.

A recent example of legislation working for the few was in the amazing fuss over the passage of the latest spending bill. Senators and Congresspeople had worked together for months on a Spending Bill so our government could function until March. It had $190 million for Pediatric Cancer Research, money for the Francis Scott Key bridge repair and a provision sponsored by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Bob Casey (D-Pa.) to keep cutting-edge technologies including artificial intelligence and quantum computing, as well as the jobs they would create, in America rather than let companies move them to China.

Musk is building factories in China. He has plans to use that technology in those factories in China where he can pay slave wages and the government arrests people for thought crimes instead of having union workers who stand up for themselves iike the unions in Sweden have. For over a year, unions in Sweden have been boycotting Tesla. They refuse to connect his charging stations to the grid and they refuse to unload his vehicles. The strike has spread to other Unions and Other Countries. All these workers standing together really annoys Musk.

On Dec. 18, the House was debating the Bill. Congressman Mike Johnson (R-La.) shares it with Musk and incoming President Donald Trump. One day later, Musk comes out with a statement that he “will primary any Republican that votes for this spending bill.” So they drop it.

Another day later, the GOP floats a Bill the Democrats will not swallow. Musk says the government should close down until Jan. 20. He clearly does not understand that we need our government to function for us. Hours before the government was due to shut down they negotiated around the original spending bill. The new bill has money for the bridge but the Child Cancer Research was stripped out and so was the provision to keep American Technology in the United States.

I hope my conservative friends are as upset about this as I am. Our future is really on the line here.

Maybe the provision that American Technology should stay here and make us all richer instead of benefiting our enemies, didn’t belong in that spending bill. Maybe it belongs in another piece of legislation. It’s something our government could do for the benefit of the country. The problem is how to get them to do it?

Nick Langworthy’s Jamestown office is 716-488-8111. Call him and tell him American Military Technology needs to stay here. Ask him to support Sens. Cornyn and Casey and include that provision in something else.

Marie Tomlinson is a Fredonia resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com