Wednesday, March 21, 2012

My Thoughts Exactly

I have been telling anyone who would listen that all of the issues we are debating as a nation are really just a symptom of a government that has shifted too much power to the federal level.  Now those Jonah Goldberg has put those thoughts into National Review:

But what if the real compromise isn’t in forcing the Left and the Right to heel? What if instead the solution is to disempower the national elites who think they’ve got the answers to everything?
Federalism — the process whereby you push most political questions to the lowest democratic level possible — has been ripe on the right for years now. It even had a champion in Texas governor Rick Perry, and Ron Paul still carries that torch.
The main advantage of federalism is more fundamental than the “laboratories of democracy” idea. Federalism is simply the best political system ever conceived of for maximizing human happiness. A one-size-fits-all policy imposed at the national level has the potential to make very large numbers of citizens unhappy, even if it was arrived at democratically. In a pure democracy, I always say, 51 percent of the people can vote to pee in the cornflakes of 49 percent of the people.
Pushing government decisions down to the lowest democratic level possible — while protecting basic civil rights — guarantees that more people will have a say in how they live their lives. Not only does that mean more people will be happy, but the moral legitimacy of political decisions will be greater.
As a nation we should be more worried about who is mayor or governor then we are President or member of congress because those should impact our daily lives to a far greater extent.  Somewhere someone along the line decided they were the end all to cure all our ills, and that can only be done from a central government so no one has to suffer that freedom of choice, yes, even to be stupid, again.

You can't outlaw stupid but somehow the feds keep trying!
DKK
 
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