Federalism: Power of The People

Having spoken at great length about Conservatism and portside Republicans, I would hope you’ve become cognizant of the fact that there is a clear difference between conservatives and republicans. One is an ideology, one is a political party. Though, both at one point espoused the concept of limited government.

I am routinely asked by my less than conservative friends this question, “So what does limited government mean? Throwing my kids and elderly parents to the wolves”? I always find this line of reasoning and extremism highly insulting.

I will start by framing my argument within the U.S. Constitution by quoting Amendment X. “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.” There you have it.

This explains limited government, and it said nothing about throwing anyone to the wolves or making old people starve. It explains the foundations of federalism, where each state is a sovereign entity and subjugates itself under the law only when there is an issue which transcends the needs of the state. For example, a kidnapping of a child in your state is a local matter. The local police take a report, investigate, and locate the child. There is some logistical and investigative assistance from the feds, but it is a local prosecution and the offender sent to a state prison. If that kidnapping crosses state lines, or is even suspected of doing so, it becomes a federal issue and the full power of the federal government can be brought to bear on this case. Amendment X means that the Constitution defines what the power of the federal government is to be, and anything not listed is left to the individual states (or so it was meant to be).

There is a method by which this Constitution can be changed, and that is ratification (of which I am not a fan as I tend to harbor that we ought not tinker with the Federal Document anymore than has already been done). However, until that happens, or unless the U.S. Supreme Court invalidates a state law as unconstitutional, the powers of the government are specifically delineated. Herein lies a major problem. Over time, we have allowed the federal government to invalidate this Amendment. In fact, we have done more than allow, we have empowered.

There was a recent story about how 12% of our nation’s high schools are “dropout factories”, which is defined as a school having less than 60% of its students graduate. I noticed in the article that this rate is no higher than a decade ago. Part of the blame is laid on “No Child Left Behind” because the focus there is to educate younger kids. And still, Congress has the same answer that they have had since the 1960s: More federal money for high schools.

First consider what has happened in the last decade. In 1991, my high school graduation year, only smart people took a computer class. Certainly we’ve come a long way from binary programs and word processors; a time when “Drag and Drop” was something you did with the fumbled snap on a punt. And, “Copy and Paste” meant Xeroxing a page, cutting something out, and using a gluestick to attach it to another sheet of paper. And to think, the IBM CEO actually said that there was no future for personal computers because people had no need for one in their home. Consider that in 1995 alone there were only a few hundred thousand webpages, and CompuServe and AOL were the social networking wonders.

Fast forward another decade to now. I have four computers in my office. Two desktops which hum along like a sewing machine. I have another desktop at home. My seven year old niece can even navigate, with the help of a favorites folder, to a dozen sites on the internet to learn about animals and a myriad of other things. Why, there are entire libraries on the internet, and one can do a research paper without leaving their home. Remember the undergrad days of living in the library searching for some obscure periodical or journal, only to find that someone tore it out and left with probably 10 years prior? Remember getting five dollars in dimes to make terrible copies of book pages and copyrights to take back to the dorm? We don’t do that anymore.There are entire university libraries that can be accessed from the confines of a barcalounger. So, why do we have students failing? It isn’t because of lack of available information. It isn’t because the internet is expensive. It isn’t because of a lack of teachers.

The problem is that the federal government has a monopoly on K-12. It is because there are mandates on schools to receive federal (OUR) money. It is because in an effort to make everyone equal, we lower standards to accommodate. We have forgotten that there are people who actually are smarter than others. Some have more drive than others. Some have more potential than others. So we ignore the problem and continue to empower the federal government to abscond with dollar after dollar of our hard earned income to fail 12% of our children. We then allow them to try and solve the problem by taking MORE of our money to throw at the problem. If that tactic works, why are we failing the same percentage of kids that we failed a decade ago?

Freedom is the opportunity to make choices. It is the knowledge that the government is concentrating on economies and wars and policing and putting out fires and paving roads. Freedom is not having to keep abreast of what the federal government is doing so that we can concentrate on OUR lives and decide for ourselves the standards and resources that we and our families need. Freedom is empowering the federal government to conduct the business for which they are suited, and leaving us to work out the things that the founders assigned to We The People.