In the 230 years of America's history, the government seems to have forgotten that its job is to run the country the way the people think is best, not the way the government thinks is best.
The most recent example is the ban on online gambling that President Bush signed into law last week. The bill makes it illegal for banks and credit card companies to send money to casinos so that people can bet on sports or chance games like roulette, blackjack, and poker.
Millions of Americans play these games every day without getting hurt, but some people get hooked on them, so the government is telling everyone in the country that they can't play these games in an online casino.
This is not the first time the government has gone against what the people want. In the early 1900s, the government decided that drinking alcohol should be illegal because too much drinking was causing some people to have health and mental problems. So, instead of teaching people how bad it is to drink alcohol for a long time, the American government banned it.
But the number of alcoholic drinks people drank went up, and because the government wouldn't let people make or import alcohol, organised crime got into the moonshine business. Eventually, the government realised they had made a mistake and got rid of the law.
The government's war on drugs, which has been going on since the early 1980s, is another great example of a policy that hasn't worked to protect people. The war on drugs costs billions of dollars in tax money every year, but what are the results?
The price of drugs has gone up, and many drug addicts have had to steal and kill to get the drugs they need to feed their habits.
There are a lot of people in American prisons whose only crime was having these illegal drugs on their person.
Instead of being a regulated and controlled industry, people are selling these drugs to kids on school playgrounds and shooting each other to protect their territory.
If the government hadn't made drugs illegal and instead made the drug business a tightly regulated business, they could have used the tax money for social programmes like schools and to give all Americans health care.
Please don't get me wrong. I'm not for making hard drugs legal, but the current system doesn't work at all. On the other hand, I'm all for making online casino gambling legal.
If I want to play blackjack or poker from the comfort of my own home, what right does the government have to tell me not to? It also doesn't make sense that I can't play in a casino over the internet, but I can drive down the street to the local casino and play there.
For this ban to be enforced, there will need to be millions, if not billions, of dollars worth of software and computer hardware to track all of the bank transactions. This money will come from taxes, instead of the government taxing online casinos or even taking over all of them and using the money to help the millions of Americans who live below the poverty line or are homeless.
The American government needs to stop treating its people like small children or the American people need to demand a new government.
