Have you noticed a trend in disaster recovery? The question is no longer how many boots are on the ground, what has been done and what is still needed. Now the question is what the centralized government has done. It is as though nothing that people do for themselves and each other counts anymore. We now grant centralized government all the power it can take as though we worship ‘our government who art in D.C.’

I find this very odd. We are the people who kicked out our earthly king. There was a congregationalist battle cry of ‘no king but Christ.’ A tireless minority of us cherished liberty over secure domination and threw off the chains of authoritarian rule. This is a nation built on decentralization of power because our founding fathers understood that power corrupts even when used with the best of intentions.

Do you recall who the Puritans were? From what I have read, they were Congregationalists. Their denomination had no earthly power structure. Each congregation is separate from all others so that, if you are excommunicated from one congregation, you can join another within the same denomination. These people were earthly anarchists who modeled the Articles of Confederation long before the Articles were written.

Our first attempt at self rule was the Articles of Confederation. This governing document shows just how much our ancestors feared centralization of power. When our modern Constitution was written, the states believed that they were sending representatives into a convention to fix the problems with the Articles of Confederation. The Federalist Papers are the advertising campaign by which the Constitution was sold to the States.

The biggest argument against the Bill of Rights was that the amendments might imply that the central government had power beyond the written text of the Constitution. Notice that the Tenth Amendment states that authority not given in the text of the Constitution belongs to the States and the People. States were superior to the Federal government. The Federal government was never referred to as the national government. Centralization was a bad thing in the free world.

We have come to think of our President as a form of king. George Washington refused to become the King of these United States so that we could have the American republic. Now we look to our President as though he can decree laws and, with the Executive Order, he actually can. Are we not a strange sort of people who are only happy under the rule of Pappa Sam?

When people are starving, send in Federal forces. Forgive the debt of foreign governments in the belief that the debt of governments is the reason that their subjects are suffering in poverty. We no longer help people. People are not supposed to help each other. The fact that we still do goes unnoticed. Stand up philosophers aside, the next generation may have no idea that people helping each other works better than sending their prayers to our government who art in D.C.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 16th, 2007 at 12:49 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.