The Death of the American State

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 22 May 2006 10:44:16 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Butler Shaffer at LewRockwell.com - the American constitutional republic is dead. Has been since at least World War II. Rest in pieces. [lew]

The entire concept of constitutionalism has failed in its fundamental purpose: to restrain state power in order to prevent tyranny from arising. Had more of us been paying attention, we would have understood that this failure was implicit in a system in which government (a) enjoys a monopoly on the use of force, and (b) has the authority to interpret the scope of its constitutional powers. This fact did not escape the notice of Lord Macaulay who, on the eve of the American Civil War, observed that "your Constitution is all sail and no anchor." A similar insight has been offered more recently by Anthony de Jasay, who noted that "collective choice is never independent of what significant numbers of individuals wish it to be."

The collapse of the foundations of the American political system has been compounded by the internal failures of Constitutional safeguards: the legislative branch, the judiciary, and the bulk of the American public, went into a simultaneous, collective collapse in the face of George Bush's grasp for what he has repeatedly expressed as his desire for a "dictatorship... just so long as I'm the dictator." The bulk of the major media -- long thought of as an aggressive watchdog of the state -- has become, through incestuous inbreeding, little more than a whining, obedient lapdog.

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