- Washington is out of control. It does as it likes, without
restraint. It spends American money and American lives to fight remote
wars for which it cannot provide a plausible reason. It determines what
our children will be taught, who we can hire and fire, to whom we can sell
our houses, whether we can defend ourselves, even what names we can call
each other. The feds read our email and track the web sites we visit, make
us hop around barefoot in airports at the command of surly unaccountable
rentacops. They search us at random in train stations without even a pretense
of probable cause. We have no influence over them, no way of resisting.
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- Except, perhaps, to ignore them.
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- Washington has learned to insulate itself from interference
by the population. Huge impenetrable bureaucracies beyond public control
make regulations that amount to laws, spending God knows how much money
to do God knows what for the benefit of the interest groups that run the
government. These bureaucrats cannot be fired and usually cannot be named.
Congress, like the bureaucracies, serves not the United States but the
big lobbies. The looters of Wall Street wreck the lives of millions, and
get millions in bonuses for doing it instead of the end of a rope.
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- Further, the federal government simply doesn't work.
It is clogged up, constipated, gridlocked, using antiquated technology
to do badly things it ought to do and things it oughtn't. In large part
this is because federal hiring rests on the desires of racist and feminist
lobbies instead of suitability for the work to be done. Whole departments
HUD, Education do much harm and little good. IRS is ruthless,
incompetent, and unaccountable, the tax laws burdensome and crafted for
the benefit of special interests and of Washington. I can change my address
with my bank online in five minutes and know that it has been done; IRS
requires a paper form and six to eight weeks to effect the change, and
you don't know whether it has been done. The goons of TSA leer at our daughters
with their porno-scanners. The VA can easily take six months to provide
a veteran's records, when it could be done online in five seconds. The
Pentagon spends a trillion a year, precious little of which has anything
to do with defending America, but can't defeat a small group of badly outnumbered
men armed with rifles and RPGs; the intelligence agencies were unable to
warn them of the prospect.
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- The government doesn't work. It is broken. It can't be
fixed. It can't be fixed because only those within it could, and their
interest lies in not fixing it.
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- The only remedy short of armed rebellion is civil disobedience
at the level of the states. Clear constitutional justification for refusal
to obey Washington lies in the Tenth Amendment:
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- "The powers not delegated to the United States by
the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the
States respectively, or to the people."
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- A great many states now begin to do a great many
things counter to Washington's wishes. I think it wise to keep resistance
within the framework of the Constitution, but the entire question comes
down to a blunt truth: No law extends beyond the lawmaker's power to enforce
it. Congress can pass a law against gravitation, but can't prevent things
from falling when released from a height. The federal government made alcohol
illegal but, in the face of massive public disregard, couldn't make it
stick.
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- What happens if, as may happen, California legalizes
marijuana not just for contrived medical purposes, but legalizes
it, period? I search in vain for the Marijuana Clause in the Constitution.
The feds do not have the manpower to enforce federal laws within California
without the help of the police of California. What happens if a state passes
a law saying that its citizens cannot be forced to buy health insurance?
What can Washington do? It can persecute individuals, but a state, or thirty
states, are another thing. The FBI can arrest any one person, but it cannot
arrest Wyoming.
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- Much depends on how sick people really are of the ever-growing
thicket of laws, regulation, imposed political correctness, surveillance,
and having to live according to the dictates of remote elites with whom
they have nothing in common.
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- At bottom, Washington's power is economic. The feds rely
for control on taxing money from the states and giving some of it back
in exchange for obedience. They cannot arrest Wyoming, but they can deny
it federal highway funds. This technique provides de facto control over
everything from kindergarten to MIT.
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- Now, if Idaho passes a law (I'm making this up) saying
that no restrictions on the ownership of guns will be enforced within the
state, Washington might choose discretion over valor and ignore it. Legalizing
marijuana, however, or refusing to accept compulsory medical care, would
be a direct if not necessarily intentional challenge to the power of the
central government. The feds could not afford to let either of these things
slide. The danger of the precedent to the grip of the governing classes
would be too great. A deadly serious confrontation would ensue.
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- What could, or would, the federal government do in response
to defiance? Send the Marines to occupy Sacramento? Or the FBI to arrest
Arnold and the legislature of California?
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- Or cut off California's financial water? No bailout for
the state's tottering economy, no more fat subsidies to the universities,
and so on?
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- The question is how ugly might things get. Washington
may be able to make the states back down. It may not. The peril for the
feds is that it might occur to the states that, while they get their money
from Washington, Washington gets its money from the states. The central
government depends absolutely on the states, whereas the states would get
along swimmingly without the current central government.
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- How tired are Americans of a dysfunctional, oppressive
Washington, unconcerned for its citizens, unaccountable and tending fast
toward the totalitarian, that sprawls across the continent like an armed
leech of malign intent? That is the question. The first time a populous
states says "No," if such a state ever does, we will get the
answer. The United States has been free, prosperous, and reasonably well
governed for a long time. It no longer is. Things go downward, within and
without.
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- Nothing lasts, change comes, and things break. We shall
see. Give it five years.
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- March 18, 2010
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- Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop
Your Inner Child Down a Well and A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing
I Aspire to Be. His latest book is Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports
from a Fractal Dung Beetle. Visit his blog.
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- Copyright © 2010 Fred Reed
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- http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed175.html
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