So, the best use of city government is to attempt to protect its citizens against oppressions of the state (in the sense of U.S. state). The best use of state government is to protect its citizens against oppressions of the federal government. And the best and nearly the only Constitutional use of the union government is to protect its members against oppressions from the rest of the world, for example in the form of the U.N. (which could be viewed as a higher level of government, and many view it as such), or other individual nations. Thank goodness we don’t have any known extraterrestrial threats or it’d be an excuse to give the U.N. power to defend us against them! The power given to any government, even if intended for defense, is dangerous. Of course, I don’t believe in compulsory monopoly government; I believe that this need for security against infringement of liberty could be provided by private competing institutions, and that such would be far better and a more efficient allocation of resources.

So I don’t see a lot of good to come from using the U.S. federal government to attempt to secure the liberty of individual citizens against oppressions committed by their state. It’s too dangerous an arrangement. Doing so has made the federal government far too dangerous, and resulted in a net loss of liberty. The states are enemies, but the federal government is worse.

So the federal government has no role in, say, being used as a tool by the citizens of Texas to liberate the citizens of Massachusetts from their oppressive state government. If things are bad in Massachusetts, that’s a private matter for Massachusians to deal with and should involve noone else. The federal government’s role is more in protecting the citizens of the other 49 states from the dangers of one state gone wrong (internal threats to liberty between members) and of course protecting from other nations (external threats).

And this is exactly the way the founders saw it. The Congress was prohibited from establishing a religion — the states were permitted to perform this despotism. The Congress was prohibited from confiscating weapons or restricting speech — the states were permitted to do it. If your state has gone wrong, the Constitutional remedy is to move, and the other remedy is private change (revolution or change of laws/elected officials) within your state.

Amen. I’m so tired of hearing about how “we” “need” a “leader” with certain qualifications.

Goodness, gracious, what would ever get done without a leader to move us forward?

Many people take the lesson of I Samuel exactly backward and think that the monarchy of Israel was an improvement because people allegedly quit doing “what was right in their own eyes” (which was in fact expressly forbidden in Deuteronomy). They pray for “good leaders” to “bring about renewal in this country” or some such.