Wednesday, May 20, 2009

What About Federalism?

The root of our two party system was the delicate battle between Hamilton and Jefferson regarding the proper relationship between the thirteen independent states and the incipient national government. Hamilton, who led the Federalists and with the aid of Madison and Jay, left us the journal of the debates called the Federalist Papers. They wanted a powerful national government. Jefferson supported strong state governments and a functional but not dominant national level.

Clearly over the years there has been an inexorable drift from Jefferson's concepts to wholehearted embrace of Hamilton's and then some.

Now we've got the spectacle of bankrupt states. California is the poster child for failed socialism and left-wing progressive policy. Take a verdant landscape with vast natural resources and a largely temperate climate, add a booming post-WW II economy, stir for sixty years and you get a profligate society of welfare dependence and indiscriminate entitlement. Overdrawn by $42 billion this budget year.

You simply can't take more and more tax out of productive hands and distribute it to all and sundry without eventually having to face fiscal reality. Ditto for New York. And Illinois. And Michigan. And Ohio.

So, there's backlash:

The Voters of California Speak

And They Say NO!

But underlying it all is the fact that there can be little doubt that the Obama administration will rescue them. It's what they do to get re-elected. Here are some carefully crafted words and an image that almost makes it difficult to consider what's for dinner this evening.

The Roiling Corpulent Trollops

Now as those bulbous bodies roll over the heartland, you need to be asking yourself, why can't supposedly intelligent folks in Washington relate the state experiments with these failed policies and extend it to the national level?

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