How States Look to Resist ‘Overreach’ by Federal Bureaucrats
27th January 2019
Parents from Indiana to South Carolina who expect to have a voice in what their children are taught in public schools find that more difficult, state lawmakers and policy analysts say, because the federal government has overstepped constitutional boundaries and interjected itself in state and local affairs.
The problem with pushing for national uniformity in an area by regulating it at the federal level is that of ‘capture’ by the federal regulatory bureaucracy by a single point of view that may not accord with the point of view of the general citizenry. Of course, that’s the prime motivation by most special interest groups that push for federalization of a question. Prohibition is the classic poster child for this approach, both in how it can succeed without true public support and how it will inevitably fail, as all programs fail that the people themselves refuse to follow.
If a whole lot of people break a certain law, it’s a good sign that the law itself probably ought not to be a law. Unfortunately, the self-righteous are rarely persuaded by this empirical reasoning. It is enough for them to see a certain course of action as being detrimental to those who choose it to justify their substituting their ‘obviously superior’ choice, even by force, on the ‘obviously defective’ choices of their targets. This never works except superficially. As Scott Adams pointed out in a recent Periscope episode, there is no way to break an addict of his addiction if the addict in question prefers that addiction to clean life. It just can’t be done without close incarceration of the person in question, and it will work only so long as that incarceration is maintained.
If freedom means anything, it means the freedom to fail, the freedom to screw yourself up if that’s what you choose to do. That unpleasant truth is why socialism and other forms of totalitarianism are so popular.