In 1794, James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, wrote disapprovingly of a $15,000 appropriation for French refugees saying, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." This vision was restated even more forcefully on the floor of the House of Representatives two years later by William Giles of Virginia, who condemned a relief measure for fire victims. Giles insisted that it was neither the purpose nor the right of Congress to "attend to what generosity and humanity require, but to what the Constitution and their duty require."
In 1854, President Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill intended to help the mentally ill championed by the renowned 19th-century social reformer Dorothea Dix. In the face of scathing criticism, President Pierce said, "I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity." To approve such spending, President Pierce added, "would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which theUnion of these States is founded."
President Grover Cleveland was the king of the veto. He vetoed literally hundreds of congressional spending bills during his two terms as President in the late 1800s. His reason, as he often said: "I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution."
Many Americans erroneously believe that the Constitution's "general welfare" clause serves as justification for congressional spending on anything they can muster a majority vote. That surely wasn't the vision of the Framers. In 1798, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated." Specifically enumerated referred to the listing of congressional authorization found in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. James Madison elaborated on this limitation in a letter to James Robertson: "[W]ith respect to the two words "general welfare," I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."
Thomas Paine said, "Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute." That observation might be a beginning to understanding today's level of federal exactation that would have only appeared as a nightmare to the nation's Founders.
http://economics.gmu.edu/wew/articles/fee/here.html
