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.

Politicians and Spam Marketers

I was sitting here thinking today as I am known to do. Thinking about our illustrious president and his campaign speeches (and subsequent ones after inauguration that may as well be called campaign speeches) and how they sound so similar to the crap I have to clean out of my e-mail box daily.

"Obama is going to heal the divisions of this country..."

"This magical herbal supplement will make you lose 30 pounds in two hours..."

Most of us can ignore the crap when it slips by the filter and ends up in our in box. So why did so many people fall for the same scam crap-talk from Obama?

I suppose it's because just over half the country really wanted to believe the guy was the friendly centrist he made himself out to be for most of the time on the campaign trail and were blissfully ignorant to the fact that he was a radical statist. They missed the "subtle" clues when he said things like "mandatory volunteerism" and "spread the wealth around" (read: higher taxes on everyone who pays them now). Unfortunately ignorance and stupidity often have the same results.
And now we are stuck with a president that is trying to take away your health care, and is too busy jetting off on a vacation to Denmark with his wife with this Olympic excuse while our troops in Afghanistan die while waiting on Obama to send the reinforcements HIS general has asked for.

So were YOU paying attention? Or did you get suckered into the Hopey Changey Spam Mail and buy the scam?

Dear Statist,

Big government is a failure. No matter what you call it, or yourselves, it has been a failure time and time again.

You call yourselves liberals. You call yourselves progressives. But what you really are shows quite clearly when examined closely enough. You are anti-individualistic brain washers whose love of the state borders upon a religion in itself. You are statist.

Communism has failed. National socialism has failed. Fascism has failed. Economic socialism has failed. You and your ideas have failed time and time again yet you continue to believe that *this* time around you will devise the "perfect" system. This fact alone speaks volumes of you and your ilk. That you could possibly believe that you as an imperfect human being could devise a perfect system is at best flawed, and at worst, lunacy. And looking at some of the people that you adore such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I tend to believe it is the latter.

Capitalism and the individual have combined to create the richest and most powerful nation on the earth ever to be seen. We are not the ones that need to follow the rest of the world. It's the rest of the world that needs to come to grips with the failures of your ideas, dear Statist.

Might I suggest you follow one of those things you and your kind are so big on, and visit a therapist? Confronting your failures and reality and dispelling the delusions you are possessed by could very well cure you.

Best regards,

a reformed statist turned conservative