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Tag Archives | Centralizers

Wallbuilders Selective Originalism

By on February 26, 2010 in Big Government, Nullification

David Barton of the organization Wallbuilders takes a firm stance against nullification. How could this be? Does he not profess to believe in the original intent of the U.S. Constitution? I guess that depends on whose intent. Barton, much like others, prefers to focus on the intent of a small faction which favored a super-powerful centralized government far beyond what was authorized by the state sovereignty minded ratifiers. 

What surprises me most about such an argument is not just that it’s obviously historically inaccurate but that the ones making it profess to believe in Godly limited government. What individual who is actually familiar with the modern day, mass-murdering leviathan based out of D.C. can actually believe such nonsense?

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Centralizers vs Tenthers on the Economy

By on February 23, 2010 in Economics, Tenthers, The Opposition

bestlookingmanever

“If only D.C. were more like Bejing!”

In an article that could have easily been entitled “Abolish the States,” Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect, laments the ways the states have prevented the bureaucrats in D.C. from centralizing even more power. Why? Because the states aren’t draining wealth from their citizens fast enough as the feds! Read along as he enviously writes about the centralized structure of the Chinese!

But other major nations don’t have federal systems … They have states and municipalities, to be sure, but either the responsibility for funding most functions of government resides with the national government, or, as in Japan, state and local governments are not required to run annual balanced budgets. In China, which probably has had the most robust recovery of any major nation, taxes and spending for everything are set in Beijing (including the lower tax rates for provinces in which manufacturing for export is the main economic activity).

A brief review of this man’s article shows the contradictory viewpoints between centralizers and tenthers when it comes to the economy. Centralizers believe wealth is created only from government force while tenthers have faith that individuals and mutually beneficial transactions can create more wealth than a bureaucrat could ever dream up. One thing Meyerson is right about is that if you give the feds a monopoly on spending power, they’ll spend like no one else in the world.

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