Might Makes Right or Bigger is Better

We are conditioned to believe that might makes right, that the bigger entity has power over the smaller.  Perhaps this is rooted in family life, where the smaller and weaker children are subject to the rule and power of the bigger and stronger parents.

As we approach 250 years from the establishment of the United States, and as we are more than 150 years after the clash of visions of the American Union that led to the War Between the States, most of us simply assume that in the United States, the federal government is where sovereignty resides.  And as the world becomes smaller, the Might Makes Right (or the Bigger is Better) dictum leads to the idea that the United States should yield its sovereignty to a larger entity, be it a regional trans-national government (like the European Union) or the United Nations.

The idea that sovereignty resides at a smaller level strikes us as incongruous.  To defy a UN decree or a federal law sounds rebellious and treasonous. 

But this is only because we have been conditioned to believe so.  We have been dumbed-down by our schools.  We have been brainwashed by television.  We have been manipulated by global elites to place our trust in government - and the bigger the better.

But in the United States - as borne out by history and the U.S. Constitution, sovereignty does indeed reside with the states.  This is what "federalism" actually means, and this is why the United States used to be treated as a plural noun (even in the Constitution itself!), and why the United States was often referred to as a "confederation" by the founders - including the so-called Federalists who truly did desire a national government.

In spite of more than a century and a half of court precedents and federal laws that have encroached upon state sovereignty, and in spite of the aforementioned stultification of our public and private school systems, a remnant of this sovereignty still remains.

In 1973, President Richard Nixon issued an executive order mandating a "national" speed limit of 55 mph.  This was done under the color of an emergency order to conserve gasoline .  After the order expired in 1974, Congress passed the National Maximum Speed Law (NMSA), which most people simply think was a "national" 55 mph speed limit.

But that's not what it was.

Congress had no authority to mandate a "national" speed limit (by the way, the word "national" never appears in the Constitution, and the word "national" was deliberately replaced by "federal" by the Constitutional Convention).  So in order to impose a "national" speed limit over the sovereignty of the states, the law doesn't actually set a speed limit.  Rather it penalized states that had speed limits in excess of 55 mph by threatening to take away federal highway funds.

And this is how the federal government bullies the sovereign states. 

Since the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913, the federal government taxes individuals.  Some of this money is held in abeyance and redistributed back to the states based on some federally desired behavior.  It is really more of a bribery - or perhaps more accurately, blackmail - scheme.

If the federal government truly had sovereignty, they would simply pass a law and enforce it.  They didn't, and they don't.  They had, and have, to make the states "an offer that they can't refuse."

This is how "national" laws and policies - like the No Child Left Behind and Common Core disasters were imposed upon the American people (under Bush and Obama respectively), by reducing the sovereign states to groveling provinces, slavishly licking the hand of their federal master for money taken from the people in the first place.  This modern view of America is at odds with the words and writings of the founders themselves.

We should be studying our American history - for example reading the Federalist and Antifederalist papers - as well as researching the "compact theory" of the Constitution.  The vilification of the Confederate States has also led to a lack of understanding of the nature of our Constitutional Union, the re-writing of our history, and the sending of important parts of that history down the proverbial Orwellian Memory Hole.  The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government by Jefferson Davis includes a recapitulation of the nature of the Union, as does Alexander Stephens's A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States.  There are several works of U.S. Secretary of State Abel Upshur (1790-1844) that inform the reader of the compact theory that is today largely ignored by jurists and suppressed by universities. 

The military defeat of the compact theory by the national theory in 1865 - in which the question was "resolved" by force of arms instead of reasoned debate - has only reinforced the Might Makes Right and Bigger is Better theses.  And even then, many of our "national" laws depend on bribery and blackmail of the states to achieve these "national" laws - and hardly anybody asks "Why?"

The American people, wrongly believing, teaching, and confessing that America is a "nation" - a unitary state - instead of a voluntary union of sovereign states, that the states must obey the federal government, and that sovereignty resides in Washington instead of with the people of their own states - are ripe for a global takeover.

After all, Bigger is Better and Might Makes Right.