Sunday, November 22, 2009

The Reason for States' Rights

I fear that many people today have never been exposed to the reasoning behind state's rights. Our public education system encourages folks to follow the following line of reasoning: The Federal Government is the biggest government. As it is the biggest government, important things like health care and education should be regulated by the Feds.

The thinking for states' rights follows a different path. This thinking holds that those things most important to an individual should be administered in a realm that can be affected by the individual.

Since it is extremely difficult to influence the decision making process 3000 miles away in Washington DC, health care and education are better left to the states.

Even the states are too large these days, which is why people are usually better off with insurance companies. The best insurance companies are small local mutual funds.

Practical experience shows that education at private schools is more cost-effective and usually does a better job than state funded education. This is because the service takes place in a realm directly under control of the customers.

The founders were happy with the protection and kinship with England, but had horrible experiences when the King of England meddled in private affairs. They understood implicitly that things that are important to a person should be administered in a realm that could be influenced by that person.

Our education system pretends to have a universal perspective of things. When we come out of school, we think of the universal perspective as a higher perspective. However, as people experience life, they find the greatest frustrations are with the big monolithic structures of big business and big government that dominates the economic landscape.

The universal perspective claimed by Hegel and Marx is at best an abstraction, at worst it is an illusion (the big lie). Society simply functions better when we realize that each person has a unique perspective and the ideal society minimizes dependencies. Where dependencies occur, the governance of the dependency should take place in a realm where the dependents have some influence on decisions.

The founders realized this nature of man and structured a government with multiple branches and layers and reserved to the states those powers which most directly affected the people.

1 comment:

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