So where does all those trillions of dollars go? It goes to the welfare state and the military, which is sort of a welfare program for the rest of the Western nations who let the US protect them instead of protecting themselves.
Lincoln warned us against the use of unrestrained warfare via the Executive branch The US Congress has not declared war since WW2 yet they seem to have been continually at war since
"The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us."
And Madison, who was the father of the Constitution and the general welfare clause, warned us against the nanny state by saying:
"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every state, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.......Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations and transmute the very nature of limited government established by the people of America"
And as we see, both military expansion and the expansion of the welfare state are said to be done for our own good. Although not a Founding Father, C. S. Lewis once warned us about what was to come as if a prophet from God by saying:
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons that under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's own will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals"
