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"The War between the States established . . .
this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final
judge of its own powers."
~ Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, p. 178
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jeffersonians warned that if the day ever arrived when
the central government became the final judge of its own powers, Americans
would then live under a tyranny. The government, they believed, would
inevitably proclaim that there are in fact no limits to its powers. That day
came in 1865 when citizen control over the federal government ended along
with the rights of nullification and secession. Not surprisingly, a
warmongering, imperialistic megalomaniac like Woodrow Wilson would then celebrate
this fact several decades later, as the above quotation attests.
The so-called system of checks and balances is a
farce and a fraud; the reality is that all three branches of the federal
government work together to conspire against the taxpayers for the benefit of
the state and all of its appendages. As Judge Andrew Napalitano
wrote in his book, The Constitution in Exile, the Supreme Court failed to rule a single federal law
unconstitutional from 1937 to 1995. The Court is essentially a political
rubber stamp operation with all of its black-robed ceremony being nothing
more than part of the circus that is employed to dupe the public into
acquiescing in its dictates.
There is no such thing as an "American
union." The original union was a union of the free, independent, and
sovereign states. If that union still existed, then Wisconsin,
Florida, Massachusetts, Alabama, and all the other states would have at least
a say in the current discussion in the Supreme Court over whether or not the
American system of healthcare should be Sovietized. They do not. Every
television and radio talking head is feverishly awaiting the Pronouncement
from Upon High from the black-robed deities of the "Supreme" Court
on this issue.
Did Thomas Jefferson, who penned the words,
"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed," really think it was a good idea to place
everyone’s liberty solely in the hands of five government lawyers with
lifetime tenure? Or perhaps even one single government lawyer with lifetime
tenure, i.e., the "swing vote" on the Supreme Court, thought by
many to be one Anthony Kennedy? Not likely.
Now with perfect timing comes a great book that asks
Americans to rethink the federal/judicial monopoly that is a primary source
of their servitude to the state. Just published by Pelican Publishers is Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century, edited and with an introduction by Donald
Livingston. It is a collection of essays by such authors as legal and
constitutional scholar Kent Masterson Brown; Yours Truly; constitutional
scholar Marshall DeRosa; philosopher Donald
Livingston; Kirkpatrick Sale, author of the book, Human Scale; economist Yuri Maltsev; and Champlain
College Professor Rob Williams.
A major theme of Rethinking the American Union
is stated in Professor Livingston’s introduction where he quotes Thomas
Jefferson as writing on August 13, 1800 that: "Our country is too large
to have all its affairs conducted by a single government." Such a vast
country detaches the people from their political representatives, which "will invite the public servants to corruption,
plunder & waste," he wrote. In 1800! If "the principle
were to prevail," Jefferson continued, "of a common law being in
force in the U.S., (which principle possesses the general government at once
of all the powers of the State governments, and reduces us to a single consolidated
government) it would become the most corrupt government on earth"
(emphasis added). This of course is exactly the kind of government that has
been existence since 1865, when all states, North and South, became mere
appendages of the central government in Washington, D.C. This relationship
was cemented into place in 1913 with the advent of the income tax and the
creation of the Fed, which gave the federal government the ability to
threaten and bribe all individuals and all state governments to acquiesce in
its dictates. As Frederic Bastiat sagely observed
in his classic, The Law,
"democracy" can become indistinguishable from socialism if it is
characterized by governmentally-coerced uniformity, whether it is for
socialized healthcare or anything else.
What could "the public
good" possibly mean in a nation of 305 million people, Livingston
asks. Well, it is what it is: "Washington could not be anything other
than a scene of frenzied pork-barrel spending, waste, inefficiency,
corruption, and special-interest patronage for the politically well
connected." As your author has often said, the purpose of government is
for those who run it to plunder those who do not.
The essays in the book are a response by a proposal
by the late George Kennan who, late in his life, proposed limiting the
tyrannical proclivities of American government by dividing it "into a
dozen constituent republics."
Nationalism was the ideological cornerstone of all
of the evils of government during the twentieth century and beyond, from National
Socialism (Nazism) to communism and welfare/warfare statism.
Devolution of power and the denationalization of government as an antidote is
the subject of the essays.
In his essay, "Secession: A Constitutional
Remedy that Protects Fundamental Liberties," Kent Masterson Brown, a
Lexington Kentucky trial lawyer and legal scholar, writes of how secession
was – and is – a remedy that evolved over the centuries as an
essential ingredient of contract law. If the Constitution is an agreement or
compact, he writes, then the states that are a party to it have a right of
rescission. "[T]he equitable remedy of rescission in the law of
contracts was one of the most important concepts applied by the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution . . ." Brown’s
essay is a careful, lawyerly history of the right of secession, its role in
American constitutional history, and of how it was undermined by statist
politicians even prior to 1861.
Yours Truly contributes an essay on how, from the
very origins of the American republic, such nationalist politicians and government
bureaucrats as Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, Justice Joseph Story,
Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln toiled mightily to rewrite American
constitutional history in such a way that would have made the propagandists
of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany blush. Indeed, the latter characters
might well have learned their tactics from their fellow nationalists in
America generations earlier. Hitler himself did in fact quote Abraham
Lincoln’s first inaugural address in Mein Kampf
to make his case for centralized governmental power and the abolition
of states’ rights in Germany.
Marshall DeRosa exposes
the fatal flaw in the current Tenth Amendment Movement, namely, that it
relies on the judgment of the Supreme Court as to whether nullification is constitutional.
This "servile posture" to the central state has been so ingrained
in the American mind by generations of government "education" that
most "Tenthers" do not seem to realize
the absurdity and futility of what they are doing. If they are serious about
the devolution of power away from Washington and back to the people of the
states, writes DeRosa, then they must realized that
"there is neither divided sovereignty, an oxymoron if there ever was
one, nor an imperium in imperio. Each of the
several States is sovereign, and as sovereigns they have the prerogative to
inform the national government that it has exceeded the grants of its
authority. Whether that is by nullification (or interposition) via blocking
national policies or a complete withdrawal from the onetime voluntary union
of the States via secession is for each sovereign State to decide."
Of course, that would take principled courage on the
part of any "Tenthers" who would not be
intimidated by the state’s usual tactic of smearing all advocates of
decentralization as racists who would like to bring back slavery or
segregation. In utilizing this particular smear tactic the state relies on
the "rational ignorance" of American history by almost all
Americans these days, and believes that it can censor all discussion of its
unconstitutional and tyrannical behavior by mere name calling.
The Tenthers must also
realize that the Supreme Court is nothing more than "a facilitator of
the national ruling class’s hegemony over the constitutional rights of
the States." They must "be prepared to bypass the U.S. Supreme
Court." DeRosa’s essay includes a
scholarly history of how Jefferson’s cherished Tenth Amendment was
destroyed by nationalist politicians, lawyers, and bureaucrats over the
generations.
Donald Livingston presents the kind of essay that he
has long been known for: a deeply scholarly effort that spans philosophy and
history. He surveys the idea of republicanism going back 2,000 years in which
it was always thought that republican government was only possible in
relatively small polities. This is the history that informed Thomas Jefferson
when he commented that the American polity of 1800 was too big to be
governable by just one government. Over half of the states in the world today
are not the massive mega-states like the U.S., but have populations of less
than 5 million people, Livingston points out.
Kirkpatrick Sale revives the Aristotelian argument
that everything in nature has a natural or efficient size beyond which it becomes
dysfunctional. He makes the case that relatively small states of 3-5 million
population have superior performance compared to large states in such areas
as prosperity, crime, human rights, healthcare, literacy, and a general sense
of well-being. He proposes a "Law of Government Size" that contends
that "Economic and social misery increases in direct proportion to the
size and power of the central government of a nation."
Yuri Maltsev applies
Austrian economics to explain the failure of the Soviet Union. Without the
institutions of private property and free market prices, there was never any
chance that socialism in the Soviet Union (or anywhere) else could work as an
economic system. Maltsev explains why in detail, in
a fine primer on some of the basic principles of Austrian economics. He also
explains why, in realizing that socialism could never work, "Kremlin
leaders realized from the first that the only way of managing an economy
under socialism was . . . with direct government coercion based on mass
murder and forced labor." The only people in the world who still believe
in socialism, Maltsev writes, are academics,
especially American academics, who always strut about their campuses posing
as Keepers of the Moral High Ground despite the fact that the system they
associate themselves with is inherently based on mass murder and
forced labor or slavery. "We should all be thankful to the Soviets that
they proved conclusively that socialism does not work," Maltsev concludes.
The final essay by by Rob
Williams is a history of the most active secession movement in America, the
Second Vermont Republic. Vermont was an independent country from 1777 until
it joined the American union in 1791; hence the name. The state’s
propaganda organs, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, have attempted to
smear those associated with the Second Vermont Republic, but their attempts
have been ludicrous. Claiming that these mostly liberal Democrats who are
disgusted with both the national Republican and Democratic parties, are
somehow part of a racist conspiracy to bring back Jim Crow Laws by advocating
their independence from Washington, D.C. is only something that someone with
an I.Q. of around 35 could believe. That is apparently the audience –
and a major target of fund-raising appeals – of such repulsive
race-hustling rackets as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the federal
politicians who support them. Unlike most "Tenthers,"
the people of the Second Vermont Republic hold no delusions that the central
state’s "Supreme" Court will someday dismantle the
unconstitutional American empire that it has spent the past 150 years
constructing.
Originally
published on http://lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo228.html
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