Thursday, October 20, 2016

Federalist Number 10 and the Mortal Diseases

James Madison writes:

"The instability, injustice, and confusion, introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have every where perished; as they continue to be the favourite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations."

This is the Democrats calling card, the instability driven by racism, implied or actual, sexism, also implied or actual, environmentalism, poverty, and the other causes that they embrace. Whether they have good intentions or not, they are in fact, the adversaries to liberty. For in each of these causes lie the seeds of our destruction via divisiveness and federal government agencies that will redistribute our wealth, and restrict our abilities to build our wealth, hence destroying our ability to pursue happiness.

Thus the framers put in clauses to restrict the federal government's power, so that these causes should be handled locally. In the sixties, the radical left started pushing for federal control over these issues, and thus ended the free market system and ushered in the era of crony capitalism and soft socialism we now have.

One of the articles that embraced giving the federal government power to fight poverty is "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" by Piven and Cloward. The Cloward-Piven strategy argued that local strategies were failures, and that the federal government needed to take control. This totally bypassed and ignored the constitutional limits set on the federal government. Worse yet, the federal government's poverty strategy is a complete failure, and has created an entire class that is entitled and beholden to government handouts.

The Statist/Marxist often argues that the General Welfare clause allows the federal government to conduct such activities. If the activity actually resulted in the general welfare of the Union then they might have a good argument. But we now know, after fifty years, that the taxes levied on half of us, to build a culture of dependency in the other half, has not only resulted in a reduction in liberty for both sides, but also divided us and may become the "mortal diseases under which popular governments have every where perished."


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