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Marc2b -> RE: Republican greed and the destruction of America (3/15/2007 11:13:42 PM)
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My two cents:
Count me amongst those who see the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as two sides of the same coin. They are both corrupt and mainly interested in keeping their party in power even if it is at the expense of what is good for the country. Both sides scream about the other side’s scandals (real and imagined) while rationalizing away their own. Little to nothing gets accomplished and so a confused electorate swings back and forth between the two parties and we go on and on with the same old, same old. Meanwhile the rhetoric, invective, and outright hatred, keep going up to where it is beginning to go off the Richter scale. Sometimes I fear we are headed for a second civil war.
So what do we do about it? While I don’t think we will ever solve all our problems (life and reality just won’t allow for that), I do think we could solve a lot – and bring the heat levels down so that the two sides of the great political divide can get along better. Most people seem to think that the solution is to give more and more power to the federal government so that broad based "solutions" (there are no solutions, only trade offs) can be implemented on a national scale. But concentrating power in the hands of the few has been getting humanity into trouble for thousands of years. What we need to do is adhere once again to the Constitution and devolve power away from the federal government.
In most of our political rhetoric we hear an inordinate amount of talk about the first amendment (not that I’m dismissing the importance of the first amendment) and quite a bit about the second and the sixth. We hear very little about the tenth amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people.
In other words: if a particular power isn’t specifically granted to the federal government by the Constitution, the federal government doesn’t have that power. So why do we have a federal Department of Education? Nowhere in the Constitution is education even mentioned. Therefore the federal government has no say over the matter. Each state government should have the final say on all education matters within that state. Each state will decide what it’s curriculum will be, what it’s standards will be, whether or not to allow home schooling or vouchers, etc. The majority in each state will decide for themselves what is best. Why should the people of a populous, State like California have a say over the education policies of a less populous State like Kansas?
The federal government has been slowly gathering more and more power and sticking itself into areas it has no business in and forcing both sides of the great political divide to fight for their policies and agenda’s on a national "all or nothing" scale. By actually obeying the Constitution and devolving power away from the federal government, each side of a particular issue gets to implement it policies in some area’s of the nation, but not all.
There is another benefit to be had from all this. Since different States would implement different policies on the same issue it would soon become apparent what worked and what didn’t. If the people of Florida’s education system wasn’t doing very good and they saw that Virginia’s education system was doing very well, the people of Florida can decide to change their policy and emulate Virginia. Devolution of power allows the States to act as testing ground for new ideas.
Of course, for this to work, each side has to accept that it can’t "have it all." Each side will have to be tolerant of the fact that they can’t have their way over the whole country (unless they can convince all fifty States to implement the same policies). I haven’t seen a lot of tolerance from either side. The ultimate source of our problems, remains ourselves.
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