The Second Ammendment Lobby and Police Safety

[120mm]

120, I understand the power of the 10th amendment, even if the Supreme Court does not. I just feel that, whatever power it had died after the civil war. Even so, the conditions that exist seem ripe for an insurgent or counter-culture attack on the traditional seats of power.

You make a valid point. The American Civil War put the lie to the 10th. The thing is, the snowball really picked up steam in the way the post WWII America pushed equal rights and liberalism. Don't get me wrong, equal rights and "some" liberalism is good, but bypassing law and the US Constitution to push them is bad. Scofflawry cuts both ways. For instance, in my state, I supported Gay Civil Unions (Gay marriage is illogical idiocy, don't get me started on that) but the Activists bribed/influenced some judges to just circumvent the legal process entirely to get their way. Horrifically bad idea to just change the rules of the game extra-legally, imo.

Certainly annoying, but hardly terrifying, and it's hard to see that as sufficient cause to start fondling weapons and dreaming of a personal secession. Whom would one shoot over such a complaint anyway?

I think Curmudgeon has a point... the restrictions on freedom experienced not so very long ago by those who happened to be born into a racial minority, or gay, or female (all of these exist in Middle America too, believe it or not) were orders of magnitude above the annoyances of excessive regulation or (gasp) paying taxes. While we're certainly not absolutely free, I don't see a serious argument that freedom has seriously degenerated. Progress in some areas, less in others... as usual.

From your point of view, of course. I have serious heartache about paying taxes that are laughably unconstitutional in nature. The Federal government has zero standing to take my money and give it to someone else. Zero. This should be something that the states may do. This is not "progress". This is reverting to the kind of thing Ancient despots would do to keep the mob happy.

Carl,

I don' think that is anything new. Reagan bemoaned it back before the end of the Cold War. It is also not unique to the US. I think the British have complained about bureaucracy for much longer and far more than we do.

What seems to be uniquely American is how we react to it. Perhaps that is a because of our national mythology of the rugged individual. Perhaps, as 120 has also noted, the complexity and centralization of the federal government acts to create the impression of powerlessness. We are a big country. It is not easy to go to Washington and complain in person, even if you could figure out who to complain to.

But this problem has found a political voice in the Libertarian movement. So it would seem like the normal release valve for tensions around the issue of a complex and unresponsive federal system is either not working or is not truly keying in on the problem.

A scarier thought is that electoral democracy, as practiced in the United States, is no longer functioning. This is not the government of the founding fathers. They had a healthy distrust of both the common people and those in power. Originally, neither Senators nor the President were directly elected by the people. The checks on power of the President, like having to go to Congress to get permission to take the country to war, have been eroded in the name of expediency. But if that is the case, I am not hearing any arguments about what to replace the system with. The Libertarians want less government but not a different one. We seem to know what we don’t want more than we know what we want.

The "impression" of powerlessness? Understatement of the millenium.

I could give a crap less about political parties. But I have a special dislike for the con artists and naive idiots that compose the so-called "Libertarian" movement. They are a laughable case study in how to be ineffective and how to inadvertantly assist those who are opposed to them.

What's "freedom"? Carl says it's the freedom to build an airport without reading 900 pages of regulations or to give a 16 old ammunition for an assault rifle. What about the freedom to drive on the wrong side of the road or the freedom to not properly perform maintenance on a civil airliner?

The world is more complex. Bureaucracy becomes more complex to deal with the emerging problems - or should we strip down the state to its bare bones where there's only a handful of decision-makers and technicians? Interestingly, in the book The Dictators, the author makes it clear that the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler relied on their personal power and their ability to subordinate and bypass the functions of their respective state bureaucracies. Hitler specifically only met his ministers one or two at a time in a private meeting when he could manage it in order to reduce the restrictions placed on his decision-making. When there's no bureaucracy, it's those with the resources (the rich, the violent, etc) that come to power. It's not freedom.

This is complete nonsense. "The world is more complex" is a justification for bureacrats to collect a check to do nothing of worth, and often to do evil.

Local governance, nested and embedded in a small central federation is worlds more efficient, responsive governmment compared to the overcentralized mess we are building.

Your example of Nazi Germany actually works against your argument. The Nazi Party and Hitler actually didn't run day to day Germany; the local governments did. And, in fact, the Vereinskultur (Club Culture) was key in running Germany in times of trouble before Hitler rose to power. Even super-bureaucratic WWII Germany wasn't so stupid as to concentrate all the power in just one man's hands.

[Kiwigrunt]

This is complete nonsense. "The world is more complex" is a justification for bureacrats to collect a check to do nothing of worth, and often to do evil.

Whether or not it is a justification for bureaucrats doing those things (and I agree with you that often it is), does not nullify anything that AmericanPride wrote.