Flash forward to today, when millions of American households just received a census form that can only be described as nosy in the extreme—complete with a cover letter warning that the law "requires that you answer these questions."

I’m not talking about the short form that most of us got, though that does go beyond the constitutionally established mission for a census (for example, telling people to classify themselves by race and age). I’m talking about the long form that one in every six households got — D-2 (UL), by name — which pries into details of your medical condition, your income and how you spend your day.

If you’re one of these people, you’ve been ordered to divulge things like:

* whether you have any trouble "walking, climbing stairs, reaching, lifting, or carrying;" "learning, remembering, or concentrating;" "dressing, bathing, or getting around the home;"

* whether you worked for pay last week and at what location; what time you usually left for work last week, how long it took you to get there, how you got there (car, bus, bike, etc.), and how many people you rode with;

* where you lived five years ago, and whether it was a house or apartment; what kind of home you live in now; how many rooms it has; how much is your mortgage or rent, and whether your rent includes meals;

* how many vehicles you own;

* where your income comes from, including "interest, dividends, net rental income, royalty income or income from estates and trusts. (In case you think it’s not worth mentioning the two bucks a month from your interest-paying checking account, think again; you’re instructed to "report even small amounts credited to an account.")

It goes on and on, for a total of 53 questions — and that’s just for the first person in a household. For each extra person, there are 33 more.

If all this seems way out of line to you, you’re not alone; the Census Bureau and members of Congress received thousands of phone calls protesting the intrusive nature of the long form. But if you ask the Census Bureau, they’re exercising a lot of self-restraint. The agency’s director, Kenneth Prewitt, says it strives to exclude all questions that are "not absolutely necessary."

Such is the mentality of the government bureaucrat in the age of the welfare state: The federal government needs to know all about you, because it must be ready to jump into any aspect of your life. It’s all for your own good, of course; if Washington is to operate efficient programs to "serve" you, why, it needs information. (In one Census Bureau TV ad, a waitress gets in trouble with her boss because she brought her baby to work when her babysitter was sick; the voice-over then tells us that the feds need to know her situation so they can provide her with child care.)

That mentality isn’t confined to the Census Bureau; it’s common among government agencies. The Health Care Financing Association tells home health-care providers to report whether patients are depressed, attempt suicide, show "socially inappropriate behavior" or make any "sexual references" in conversations. The FAA makes airlines profile passengers, keeping track of who travels with whom, whether tickets are bought in advance or just before departure, etc. The list, like the census, goes on and on. (For more examples, see [Like it or Not] Big Brother is Watching.)

This sort of thing is what we get from big government, of course. Under its expansive logic, everything is federal business. I feel safe in predicting it’s not going to stop here. The lure of building ever-larger databases containing all the world’s knowledge will prove irresistible to Washington’s social engineers. After all, knowledge is power.

We’ve come a long way from that aforementioned U.S. Constitution, which restricted the national government to a few carefully defined functions, and stressed that any powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government resided elsewhere—with the states or the people. The more intrusive Washington grows, the more obvious it is that the Founding Fathers knew what they were doing. Their wisdom is, if anything, far more relevant today than ever. We need to get back to following it while we still can.