“Never Let a Good Crisis Go To Waste”
15th May 2010
The functional equivalent of a hammer for totalitarians.
I quoted the prescient warnings of the Anti-federalists, who warily regarded the proposed Constitution as affording a grant of powers that might lay dormant for some time, but which – in the midst of crisis – would be readily seized upon as providing the only means for remediation of whatever dire exigency might be facing the nation. Thus, Federal Farmer wrote, ” The lever by which power would ultimately be accrued was the use of powers not necessarily then required, but granted for future possible use as would be “necessary and proper.” Wrote the Pennsylvania minority, “the legislature of the United States are vested with great and uncontroulable powers, of laying and collecting taxes, duties, imposts, and excises; of regulating trade, raising and supporting armies, organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, instituting courts and other general powers…. And if they may do it , it is pretty certain that they will; for it will be found that the power retained by the original states, small as it is, will be a clog upon the wheels of government of the United States; the latter, therefore, will be naturally inclined to remove it out of its way.”