South Carolina Tenth Amendment Center
But not on anything you would expect from a government adhering to the Constitution. Healthcare, financial markets, petroleum exploration and extraction, economic activity, immigration, national ID cards, cap and trade, smoking, transfats & salt, CAFE; gun control, taxes, price controls on labor, electricity, and banking. The list goes on.
No matter how well intentioned, there are two things to point out about this. The first is that none of it fits in the 17 enumerated powers of Congress. The second is that even if it were, there is no way that body of men and women could ever hope to efficiently run all those areas of our lives. The breadth of control required dooms it from the start. They could not possible know everything to know about the extremely large, complex, and fast moving America we live in today. Every attempt to do so only gives us a legacy of bloated bureaucracies that are expensive to maintain, and expensive for us to comply with and respond to.
Don’t expect an overnight change. Things are this way because of elected officials that we elected. The power to inhibit liberty has reached a critical mass, and the only way to turn the tide is to move the power somewhere else, and disperse it.
That’s where the 10th amendment comes in. In language as clear today as it was in the 18th century, the 10th amendment ensures that states are under no obligation to bend to the whim of the central government. When states across the nation begin to push back, as we are now seeing with the Health Care law with nullification, power is naturally devolved away from where it has pooled. No one group or individual can have a lot of power when every group has some.
What’s the action plan? Talk to STATE elected officials, watch their voting record, ask them of their plans for nullification of federal laws. Hold them to their word, and remember. Remember what they said and what they did when they come up for reelection. Find the candidate who most closely matches your values, not the political party that most closely (or least distant) matches them.
This will put them on edge. When they feel safe in their official capacity, they vote with their party or their ego. When they feel the heat from back home, and have a healthy fear for their job their priorities will be our priorities.
Our priority must be liberty. Without it, there can be nothing else.
Scott Martin is the State Chapter Coordinator for the South Carolina Tenth Amendment Center.
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Also to clarify the whole issue is that the Government can't do everything well. Indeed history and the basic nature of government would seem to indicate that government is not predisposed to do ANYTHING even security particularly well, as its not in competition.
So when our founders created this necessary evil that is government, they did so with the understanding that if it had to exist to do anything at all it should be focused on them tasks, and not be embowered or made responsible to do anything else.
In that way the people can better hold them accountable for their rise and failures in regard to that function alone, without having to compromised and complicate by other compounding issues/failures in the deciding of their vote.
The more your pile on to the wagon the harder it is to be pulled(higher tax burden) and the more difficult the wagon is to control.
This is actually one of the reasons communist proposed that we elect directly the head of every industry, the problem with that of course is 2 fold:
1: It presumed that the whole or at least the majorty of the population has the nessary personal knwolage as to know how to run every indistry. Nobody has that kind of knowledge, we as a civilization due to the complexity of our technology and indistrys are mostly all forced to specalized in some spesfic areas inorder to simply be able to deal with that area of expertises competently. To expect that we could competently judge on the matters of all other areas is to expect that we could know as much about all other areas of economic and technological life as we do in our own.
Some of us think we do that but none of us really can, because none of us are omnipotent. All of us have brains containing a limited amount of knowledge and skills, which we have accumulated over our life time. We simply don't have the time or capability to be an expert in everything, nobody does, and nobody probably ever will. Let alone the majority of the population which would have to have such expertises in order to cast intelligent votes.
2: It's a lot more complicated and time consuming to figuer out what someone else is up to then what you yourself as an individual are up to. The reason for this is ovious, you can read your own mind, you can't read theirs, so you don't have very far to go to figure out what your up to or at least what your trying to do. This is not so with regard to other people whom you must elect, and even less so the further away(harder to watch) and less specifically accountable(your a smaller and smaller share of the vote) them people are to you.
As a result Governments legitimate and necessary functions must be as few in number(specialized) and as divided(accountable/controllable) as possible.
It is for this reason our founders did not make a comprehensive government able to do anything and everything, instead they made a very limited and very divided government.
Its not made for efficiency its made for the safety of individual liberty.
Its probably a typo but, I'd remove immigration from your list as that power is in Article 1 Section 8 Clause 4:
"To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, "
Other then that its a great article and point good job Scott!
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