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Make the States Sovereign Again
As long as we are making America great again, and making America healthy again, and making all things new and great again, perhaps we could include returning to constitutional order making the states sovereign in a federalist republic again.
How might we do that?
First, we could end the federal ownership of state lands, including national parks. Everything but federal military bases. Most of the Western States are in large part owned by the federal government, as they were admitted to the Union with a congressionally mandated proviso that everything that wasn’t owned by anyone else remained under the ownership of the federal government. Eighty percent of the land in Nevada is federally owned (maybe that was OK when the US was doing atmospheric atomic testing in the 1950s and 60s, but that time is long past). Most Western states have above 50% of the land under ownership of the federal government… No Western state, with the exceptions of Texas and Oklahoma, has less than 20% of its land owned by the federal government. (Texas and Oklahoma are unique in that they were the Republic of Texas before they became part of the US and were not subject to the diktats of Congress regarding land ownership. They got a better deal. Oklahoma was subsequently split off from Texas.). Most Eastern, Midwestern, Atlantic, New England, and Southern states have around 1-3% of their land owned by the federal government. Unfair in the extreme. The Western states are still seen almost as territories rather than states in regard to land ownership. Were this land returned to the states, along with the national parks (make them state parks), we could eliminate the BLM (that’s the Bureau of Land Management, not Black Lives Matter), the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Forest Service. And the Department of Interior to boot.
This would have the salutary effect of disallowing the federal government from dictating resource extraction in the Western states. Or, rather, blocking it with malice aforethought as with Biden and Obama, or for a quid pro quo, as with Clinton and southern Utah energy extraction to accommodate his campaign finance benefactors, the Riady Family, via their connections with the Chinese military. (Admittedly, Biden went whole hog and blocked offshore everything, and this proposal wouldn’t help that).
The foremost reform that would restore the sovereignty of states in our so-called Federalist Republic would be to eliminate the federal income tax (as various Ricochetti have described). Re-ban once again any direct tax on citizens (federal income tax). This would take a Constitutional amendment to rescind the 16th Amendment. Such an amendment should also specify that only an indirect tax could be levied on the states, at a set amount per capita, so that each state would remit to the federal government a tax based on the population of the state. In my extremist view, I would favor a provision in such an amendment that disallows tariffs completely. I would reluctantly allow the federal government to levy transactional taxes — very reluctantly. If we have learned anything from the 16th Amendment, it is that any taxing power allowed to the federal government will be taken to an extreme, abused, exploited, and used as a club to beat the citizenry into submission. (Think Lois Lerner, the Tea Party, and 503 slow walking to block a large segment of the electorate from participation in a national election–which though perpetrated by the Obama administration, was supported by the Republican party as well–that alone should be enough to forever ban a direct federal tax on citizens, as it will be used as political warfare against citizens–one of the greatest shames ever perpetrated on the American electorate by the federal government). The federal government needs to be severely constrained in its taxing ability. As it stands now, based on recent Supreme Court rulings, there is no limiting principle at all on Congress’ taxing power. That needs to change. (Recall Roberts’ opinion on the Obamacare tax/penalty–that sly quantum legal wave-particle duality theorist and Chinatown aficionado–“She’s my daughter-slap. She’s my sister-slap; she’s my daughter AND my sister-stunned recognition– and Kavanaugh’s opinion in Moore regarding retroactive taxation of unrealized capital gains–truly obscene.)
Such an amendment, in my view, would include a ban on any federal money going to states. Also, a ban on any federal money going to NGOs, nonprofits or foundations. Period. Not allowed. Federal money, collected from the states as indirect tax revenue, would only be allowed to pay for federal government necessities. Money should flow in one direction only — from local to state to federal. Not the other way around. As it stands, the federal government bypasses states to collect revenue directly from citizens, which it then uses to fund state activities, such as Medicaid, education, etc. That should not happen. Sending money from citizens to the federal government empowers the federal government at the expense of the states, and that centralization of power completely unbalances the original constitutional balance of power. It is not just the tripartite federal government (legislative, executive, and judicial) balance of power, but the balance of power between the states and the federal government that is crucial to a viable federalist republic. That balance has been destroyed by the federal income tax, among other things.
Further, there should be a ban on federal money going to individual citizens for any purpose whatsoever. This would essentially ban both means-tested entitlement programs (which are dangerously propelling our debt) as well as non-means-tested programs (SS and Medicare/Medicaid). This would need to be spun off from the federal government, made optional at a minimum, privatized, or ended for upcoming generations. This would allow younger generations to avoid the impossible burden of the intergenerational involuntary Ponzi scheme that is SS and plan for healthcare outside the purview and iron boot of the federal government (for those unaware, we have a defacto single-payer healthcare system with fixed prices and regulations that are Orwellian: Everything that is not permitted is forbidden.)
Whatever entitlements may be desired can be established at a state level. That would at least allow different approaches, as opposed to the monolithic centralized approach we now have. Vastly superior approaches to retirement security (an example is found in Chile) can be developed in different states. The same with healthcare. Let states decide what kind of healthcare financing they wish to establish. Universal health savings accounts in one state, a Canadian-style system in another state. See what each prefers and what works.
Ending the federal income tax would end the favorable tax treatment of nonprofits, foundations (both public and private), and NGOs. No longer would George Soros get a tax benefit for funding riots that resulted in the burning of federal buildings. Or the Rockefeller Foundation for supporting forced sterilization of the “unfit”. Foundations and charitable organizations would not cease to exist — they existed before the federal income tax — but all too many foundations, including the Rockefeller and the Lilly foundations, were established specifically for tax purposes. And the federal tax system adds to the distortion of healthcare financing, as Michael Cannon has energetically argued, resulting in rising healthcare costs and distortions of worker benefits.
States could decide how they want to extract revenue from citizens to pay the federal bill for the state. Some states have no income tax. Some states have no property tax. Nevada obtains royalties on gambling revenue. Transactional taxes alone could likely suffice to pay the federal tab. A state could impose a flat tax. California might opt for a steeply progressive income tax along with steep corporate taxes in concordance with its Socialist/Communist orientation. Of course doing so might induce more companies, far beyond Tesla and Chevron, to flee the Golden (Fleece) State. And, since the federal levy is based on population, states would have an additional incentive not to admit illegal aliens as Sanctuary States (which illegal immigrants California insists on counting in the Census to procure more House seats) as that would increase their tax bill.
Returning to state legislatures the election of senators would be a great boon to allow state interests to be better represented in the national government. With an indirect tax levied per population, states would definitely want a say in the federal budget, as it would dictate what the state would be required to cough up to the federal fisk. With the 17th Amendment, the election of senators became party-based rather than state-based. The senators represent the interests of the party, not the state. This leads to serious limitations on states’ abilities to have their interests represented at the federal level. Just because there was a corrupt senator from Montana who bought his seat from the legislature in the late 19th and early 20th century was no reason to upend the constitutional order to vitiate state representation. This, in my view, created a severe distortion in power, tilting the playing field steeply in the direction of federal power and party interests.
The federal budget should be divided among the states on a per capita basis. The federal government should be required to stick to that budget unless there is a 2/3 vote of Congress to deficit spending in case of war or another major emergency. With that type of decision reserved to Congress, with representation of the people in the House and the states in the Senate, a modicum of constraint on federal spending would be in place, and there would be some hope of fiscal sanity, which has long since been abandoned in the nation.
The idea that the US government has the prerogative to establish departments and agencies dealing with ever more local matters (Housing and Urban Development, Environmental Protection, Dept of Education, HHS, OSHA, CFPB, SEC, etc.) needs to be abandoned, forever and anon. Otherwise our liberties will be submerged in a bottomless sea of regulations and federal overreach. The Progressive ideas that have hamstrung the nation for well over a century need to be jettisoned. Progressive policies pave the road to serfdom.
It is getting to the point that old codgers, at least myself, feel like we are living in the South in the era of Reconstruction, with the feds dictating every policy. (Except, of course, in the case of California, which is trying to dictate policy for the rest of the states, going beyond what even the federal government has done, with their diktats on electric vehicles. Hopefully Trump can succeed in stopping California’s power grab–or Californians themselves will come to realize that the Leftist policies are poison for their state–by recalling Newsom and reversing course).
Touch those entitlements, President Trump!
So far has the nation devolved into centralized tyranny, that I almost begin to think George Mason was right about ratification.
Published in General
Too late tonight to read this all now, but wow does this sound interesting.
Congress was supposed to control over only the federal district and a specific list of places (forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings). Presumably post offices and post roads are included in this list as well. These places were supposed to be purchased from the States.
Constitution Article I Section 8 Clause 17:
There is nothing in the constitution that allows Congress to withhold other land within a Territory when it becomes a State. So all the western states have a strong case to re-take control of their land.
A minor point is that only the Oklahoma Panhandle was part of the Republic of Texas. The rest of Oklahoma was purchased from France in the Louisiana Purchase. The Oklahoma Panhandle and other Texian land north of it was split off from the Republic of Texas when it joined the Union because it was north of the Missouri Compromise line that forbid slavery north of 36°30′ latitude. Because the Oklahoma Panhandle was unorganized territory until 1890, ranchers and settlers squatted on the land, and their claims were legalized via homesteading after 1890. (My great-grandfather was one of those who homesteaded in the Panhandle in 1906.)
The downstate part of Oklahoma was given to Indian tribes, mostly to the Five Civilized Tribes when they were exiled from the southeast, starting in the 1830s. Because the Indians sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War, they lost large tracts of land in the peace treaties they signed after the Civil War. More land was taken from the Indians in the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887. Communal Indian land was given to Indian heads of households, so the tribes no longer held land communally. The “excess” land was homesteaded in the famous land runs. Thus Oklahoma escaped the situation faced by other western states wherein the federal government controls large parts of those states.
Fascinating stuff, Steve. Thanks!
I love Ricochet. I never know what I’m going to learn here…
Golly, that must have been fun.
Lordy…
I think you’re right. The other day Trump was browbeating and threatening the Governor of, Maine, I think it was, because she said she would obey the law, but she didn’t wouldn’t say she would obey Trump on DEI policy. Or maybe it was gender policy–trans men in women’s sports. Whatever. Centralized tyranny is right.
And on immigration policy, one can easily suspect, given his behavior on other matters, that Trump cares more about obedience from the states on immigration policy than he does about immigration policy.
This was a huge problem with Biden, too, which reminds me, has anyone ever seen Biden and Trump together in the same room at the same time?
Hmm, come to think of it there were the debates and there were the inauguration day ceremonies. So we can at least we can be reasonably sure they are two separate centralizing tyrants.
@NanoceltTheContrarian
Is there something in the water in Georgia and Utah. I live in Alpine now and spent my early years in Athens and we have a very similar image of what our Constitution was meant to yield in the form of a Union and what it really means to make America great again.
The “general welfare” clause is in the preamble and has been often cited as justification for the expansion of federal power often for outcomes that have little to do with general welfare, which I interpret as applying to all equally. I think what you have covered takes care of most of the mistakes caused by an extended and erroneous use of that clause
Not much mention in the OP of the overuse of the commerce clause. Many problems today are resulting from the changes that have taken place in our monetary and banking systems. These features are critical elements in the functioning economic system that is the underlayment of the individual liberty possessed by all Americans. Taxation and federal borrowing authority you cover but banking and corporate issues are not given much treatment. That’s just commentary on an area I think needs attention. Banking and insurance businesses including federal insurance of residential home loans and education loans are examples. Health care, too.
Great post!
I would start here . . .
Yes, repealing the 17th Amendment does not require all the preliminaries that the 16th’s repeal might require.
My 3rd-great-uncle Eli White Crowder led the Black River Band of Choctaws from Mississippi to Fort Smith, Arkansas in the 1840s to be settled in Oklahoma. He also led a group under General Jackson in Alabama during the War of 1812.
Was he at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend? It’s hard to believe it is almost 20 years since I visited the site (by bicycle) and also the treaty site where General Jackson shafted his native allies. We camped there the evening after I did a bicycle ride from Selma to Montgomery. I thought the military museum at Horseshoe Bend was of high quality.
Yeah, hard to tell those guys apart.
I mean, honestly…
Not a minor point at all. Great information. Thanks
Your family history sounds fascinating. I would love to hear more.
My excuse is that I grew up in southern Nevada (an area settled by Mormons and originally part of Utah, but carved off of Utah to punish Mormons for polygamy in the 1870s) in the 1950s downwind of the Nevada test site, when they were doing atmospheric testing of atomic bombs. My parents witnessed the July 5th Hood detonation, that largest atmospheric detonation (about 75 kilotons) en route to hospital in Las Vegas in the early AM as my mother was at term with one of my younger sisters.
And you are very correct that I didn’t get to the commerce clause, banking, corporate issues. I ran out of steam. To be brief, the third pillar of the Progressive Trifecta in the Progressive Era was the establishment of the Federal Reserve, which I believe needs to be ended. I would reference George Selgin in his writing on the history of the Federal Reserve, including that the plan was manipulated by the Senator from New York, who basically left the New York banks in the catbird seat, and the regionalization that was intended never happened. The Fed was not without fault in the Great Depression, as Benjamin Strong, the head of the NY Fed, had maintained low interest rates throughout the 20s to assist England’s recovery from WWI, creating stock and commercial real estate bubbles that burst when, after his death in 1928, the new governors hiked interest rates, leading to the Stock Market collapse of 1929, and etc. Ending the federal reserve, and allow free banking, is Selgin’s advice, with which I concur. Selgin also has proposed a rules based process to maintain the money supply, which could be run out of the Treasury, and the Fed ended.
Wickard v. Filburn is a wicked SC decision, essentially coerced by Roosevelt when he got the 4 Horsemen to resign the SC seats and got new Justices, applying the Commerce clause to the grain produced on his own farm to feed his own livestock as affecting the price of grain, and therefore subject to the commerce clause, under Roosevelts New Deal boondoggle. It needs to be overturned. So perverse is its effect that the EPA has claimed jurisdiction over every drop of rain that falls in the US under the navigable waters of the United States.
Of course I favor elimination of the federal corporate income tax. Let States regulate corporations. Anti trust is a mess and needs to be abandoned, and only seems to provide fodder for harming consumers under the banner of antitrust legistation.
More: The FBI was born as a rogue agency and has remained so. It will never be anything but a rogue agency, run mostly by psychopaths, from J. Edgar on. They were born illegally with no funding or authorizing legislation from Congress, just Teddy Roosevelt deciding, along with his AG, a nephew of Napoleon, that he wanted his own police force (he had been the police commissioner in NYC). Money was illegitimately taken from the Secret Service to fund the agency. Its first claim to fame was to investigate and intimidate Congressmen investigation Teapot Dome, which became such a scandal that the director of the bureaus had to step down. His assistant, J Edgar, was appointed director by….Calvin Coolidge, who should have known better. The FBI sort of solved some of the Osage murders (mostly due to the work of a former Texas Ranger who was truly a great law man, whom J Edgar despised, but had no one at the bureau competent to pursue those investigations. With this little bit of success the FBI got legislative legitimacy, but has been rogue ever since, exemplified by Shumer’s comment about how much the agency could hurt Trump if he crossed it. Truly despicable. The FBI should be an advisory agency to state and local law enforcement and have no law enforcement powers. States should investigate and try crimes. For federal crimes, US Attorneys should work with State and Local law enforcement, advised by the FBI. That would end all those turf fights over jurisdiction. Yeah, keep the fingerprint data base and the crime lab, and educate State law enforcement to do the job. NYC had better law enforcement and anti terrorist capacities than did the FBI.
End the FISA warrants. These are only abused. The Chief Justice is supposed to oversee these courts, but is AWOL entirely. This is star chamber type stuff.
The CIA is also a rogue agency and needs to be dismantled. Its functions can all be handled by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The CIA never has been, and never will be, a legitimate agency. It is a threat to national security and American liberty. This has been particularly evident in recent years, but it was true before the Church investigations.
End the Department of Homeland Security and rescind the Patriot Act, no matter what John Yoo says. This agency is harmful to the nation and American liberty. Put the NSA entirely under the Defense Department and bar it from surveillance of American citizens.
The NIH needs to be dismantled, and the US government needs to get out of the business of medical research. Let the Scientists work out of Universities and get their funding privately. Having the government fund science gets you government science, which is nothing like the original thing. As we have seen.
Government funding of scientific research, “Big Science” Has gone off the rails. (I say that as someone who at one point in my life was greatly enthusiastic about, and greatly disappointed in the failure to fund the Texas Superconducting Supercollider). Elon Musk has shown how limited federal funding of science and technology is. Unleash the private sector. Things will go much better. innovation will explode. AI (and it will always be artificial–note the news that the law firm Morgan and Morgan has just been sanctioned for using AI to create false documents). Yes, the Manhattan Project was amazing. But that is a long bygone era that will never return with our current corrupt, venal, and incompetent scientific community.
There should be a private body of clergy of all denominations, ethicists, non scientists, those outside the scientific or medical community, to oversee the activities of the researchers, to prevent the transhumanist focus of modern biological and medical science, as well as the hard sciences. The social sciences could just as well be abandoned, as they are far more harmful than beneficial. There is no solid grounding for the social sciences at all; that there is, is only a pretense.
The FDA should be an advisory body only. No police power whatsoever. The entire progressive idea that a government agency can verify the efficacy and safety of medications is entirely off base. The errors, omissions, and harm of the FDA are hard to overstate. Milton Friedman said something to the effect that the main effect of the FDA is to keep liver saving medications out of the hands of patients.
HHS needs to be dismantled. Same with HUD. The federal government has no business running such agencies. There are as pertinent now as reconstruction.
All of the think tanks need to be entirely privately funded. With no income tax, there would be no coerced support of these from taxpayers. Particularly if there were a ban on government grants or any form of monetary support from government to these agencies.
But it has long been true that science has gone off the rails. It was off the rails for the first half of the 20th Century, with Eugenics the greatest project of the so called scientific community. Eugenics went sort of underground after WWII, but became the basis for abortion. Culling the human population while trying to pursue a eugenics and transhumant science is still the focus of much of what the government is doing, and what science is pursuing, particularly with the advent of CISPR technology to modify the human germ line.
The SEC is a joke. Didn’t stop Bernie Madoff or Bankman-Fried. If stock markets can’t police themselves they will collapse.
All of the means-tested entitlements need to be ended. Let American generosity privately meet the needs. Require all those charitable foundations involved in politics reorient toward help for the poor. Let private philanthropy provide medical care for the indigent. Americans are insanely generous, and government only vitiates and harms the charitable nature of American citizens.
Look at the Catholic charities. The federal government has turned them into collaborators with criminal cartels in human trafficking!
But my soapbox just collapsed so I’ll stop now.
I don’t have a good explanation for what Georgia and Utah (and Mormon territory) might have in common.
I miss the West, but, having grown up in Nevada, feel a little more secure in Georgia from a water standpoint, given that we have a temperate rain forest just up the road (Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest).
When I first moved to the Athens area, a somewhat arrogant and liberal physician informed me that Athens was like a diamond in a bowl of grits. Given the politics of Athens, i prefer the grits. (I live in Oconee County-very conservative).
Over time the Fed has tended to exacerbate the boom and bust cycle instead of smoothing it out. Because it takes 12-18 months for just half of the impact of rate changes to be felt in the economy, by the time the Fed’s actions have hit, the crises would have long passed of its own accord.
Most all of my direct paternal ancestry is around Danielsville in Madison County. My 5th Great-grandfather went there in 1790 on a 1000 acre grant from the federal government for his service at the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780. He was living in Burke County, NC before that. I spent a little time in Athens in the early 1940s.
That is an area of good, down to earth, commonsense, Christian country folk. Great area.
They both wear suits.
They both lie a lot.
They both are in the business of accumulating centralized power. Their border policies differ, but they both favor smashmouth federal action against the states.
They both have enhanced hair on their heads.
They both stabbed Ukraine in the back.
But they differ on DEI and transgender stuff, so if you work at it really hard and look past all the similarities, I think you can find some differences.