Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of A Conservative Chapter 2 is here.
Now on to Chapter 3, State’s Rights. (The book was ghostwritten by L. Brent Bozell Jr., brother-in-law of William F. Buckley.[1] Bozell and Buckley had been members of Yale’s debate team.)
The good Senator comes right out of the gate and blasts both parties, the Democrats AND Republicans for failing miserably to control the size of Fedgov. Both were guilty then, both are guilty now. The Democrats are at least honest and don’t pay lip service to State’s Rights like the GOP does. Even when the GOP ran the show in the 2000’s Fedzilla still grew. They couldn’t even kill the Ethanol subsidy! We burn our own food in our gas tanks! And the federal deficit doubled, libetries were taken away for ‘security’, more shackles of slavery placed on every American. I expect this kind of behavior from the Democrats, and now I expect it from the Republicans as well.
Goldwater explains how we got in this mess (again he is prescient in this 1960 book). We know how its done too. Fedzilla takes money in taxes from citizens, skims a good percentage of it in the Washington DC money laundering racket, and then sends it back to the states with strings attached. The mob does this as well, its called loan sharking and usually gets a RICO arrest and plenty of jail time when the perp is found guilty. In this case the perp is both sides, the GOP quit playing cop against the organized criminal gang of the Democrat Party. I have ZERO confidence in the current leadership of the GOP and am disgusted by what they did last time they were in power. The deficit was doubled and our liberties taken away by the Patriot Act and the creation of these over reaching ‘security’ agencies.
The amazing thing is that most people simply don’t understand that they are being robbed at gunpoint in this scheme. Fedzilla with the coercive force of the state demands money from you so they can take a percentage of it for themselves and then send the money back to the states with demands and strings attached. Every dollar they take from a state’s citizen goes to empower DC not the local capital. This has got to stop or we will lose our liberties at an ever faster pace. This message is being taken to the public now though with some of the rising stars of the GOP; much to the chagrin of the old guard at GOP HQ who are not amused! We have to educate people on this shell game. It is one way to preserve what few liberties we have left.
Goldwater argues that most people see through the DC money laundering and know that Fedzilla money does not come for free. I am not so sure that this is the case in 2013. Do a majority of voters understand the Racket? Do they care? I believe that this is one thing that must be explained by the libertarians and Fiscons ad nauseaum. Make it hit home, explain it and explain it again. Explain that the alternative is that the local State should be returned to its set of rights and responsibilities AT THE COST OF power concentrated in DC. States Rights is one place where there is a Zero Sum Game. the money has to stay in the State because the State will know better how to spend the money because it will be locally driven. 50 Laboratories working on individual solutions right for their situation is far better than 1 Lab creating Fedzilla! What works in one State might not work in another. Or, a State may come up with something that the others can use. The solutions worked at the local State level don’t take rights and liberties away from the other 49. Fedzilla solutions do.
The local state politicians refuse to vote ‘no’ on this type of shell game. They think that they are doing their constituents a favor by getting money from DC! They actually doom these citizens to more links in the shackles. This is indirect coercion but coercion none the less. It is in fact blackmail. Accept the funds and the demands and the ever expanding fedgov or lose power. If the states would get together and stand firm, they could easily break the DC money laundering racket.
Fedzilla also coerces the State by threatening to step in if DC thinks that the State should act on something. This is where the 10th Amendment comes in. The 10th recognizes the State’s jurisdiction in given areas. The State can either act or not as it sees fit. With these rights come responsibilities. The State politician is directly beholden to the citizenry in a very real sense. Usually, everyone knows how to get a hold of their State representative pronto. He usually lives right down the street and has an office near the voter. In my case, he is a driver and 4 wood away and gets an earful from us quite often. The bureaucrat in DC doing the bidding of busybody politicians is unreachable. He is a faceless cog insulated from the wrath of the voters, he doesn’t care what you think. Your opinion and vote does not impact him in almost all cases.
“Nothing could so far advance the cause of freedom as for State officials throughout the land to assert their rightful claims to lost State power, and for the Federal Government to withdraw promptly and totally from every jurisdiction which the Constitution reserved to the States.” -Barry Goldwater
Tags: Barry Goldwater, Libertarianism
