The Slow Death of Federalism

It's been a long, slow, death march for federalism as the rough hands of the statist thugs drag it to the gallows.

The reality in American government today is so distorted from what the Founders had worked so hard to build that I highly doubt they'd even recognize this country today as the one they created.

Today the federal government blackmails the States and wields authority over them using the financial carrot and stick that may as well be an iron cudgel. It used to be that if one State placed an unfair burden on any citizen or group of citizens, they could move to another State and escape the high taxes or targeted legislation. When the federal government gets the power over you, you cannot escape without giving up on the country entirely. And then where will you go?

As we watch the social experimentation states such as California teeter on the edge of collapse, the federal government wants the power to do all of that and more, and when the collapse comes, both financial and of our liberty, we will not be able to escape it.

William Buckley once said he'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than 2,000 faculty members at Harvard. Well I would rather be governed by the first 535 names in my phone book than this insane Congress. The point is that a random number of people taken out of your local phone book are much more likely to share your concerns being in your own community than some detached elitist at some stuffy university or in federal government. Just because they have a PhD. doesn't mean they know what's best for anybody other than themselves. Professors and politicians certainly don't know what's better for me than I do. Those professors and politicians that think they do are nothing more than an aristocracy in waiting using words and studies full of skewed "facts" to convince you to give over your liberty to them, their ideas, for the "greater good". (Look at the federal Congress today. How many of them already walk around like they are royalty? How many already ignore you?)

When you allow someone that has no idea who you are, or what your concerns are to govern you, you enable them to do to you what they will, all the while believing they are doing what's best for you. This is one of the many reasons why the federal government was supposed to have power over limited things such as printing currency, foreign relations, and raising the military, and the individual States and the people were to take care of everything else. The federal government, as designed by the Constitution of the United States, was to have little to NO impact on the lives on the individual citizen. It's much harder for State officials to ignore you. They live in your state. And it is even more difficult for local officials to ignore you. They live in your town. Yet we keep giving more and more power to people who can so easily ignore us and have no real interest on the impact some new law has on us, because they live no where near us.

Yet here we are, in 2009 and you cannot escape the oily fingers of the federal government. And now they want to dictate to you your health insurance, your doctor, and following that it will be what you eat, what physical activity you do... because you are overweight (or will be) and cost everybody more in taxes...

Keep it up people. Let's see if by the 300th birthday of the nation we can make this place truly unrecognizable.