How the States Committed Suicide
15th December 2013
How did the once-sovereign states become wards of Washington? They did it to themselves. State politicians came to recognize that they would benefit from a more powerful national government. As scholars like Michael Greve and Todd Zywicki have shown, state actors helped to break down the original constitutional system of “competitive federalism,” which kept government limited as states competed with each other to attract business and labor. In its place they contrived a parasitical “cooperative” or “cartel” federalism, in which states extract wealth from each other through the federal government.
Actually, it started when the South lost the Civil War. It was our misfortune that they were on the wrong end of the moral argument about slavery and so lost the more fundamental principle of states’ rights for all of us.
December 15th, 2013 at 21:04
* War of Northern Aggression
December 16th, 2013 at 03:48
Exactly. The Founding Fathers erred in their assent of human nature. They believed politicians would jealously guard their privilege, thereby aligning lawful checks and balances with natural inclinations. The natural inclination to conspire and loot is revealed as more powerful than political jealousy.