Maggie's Farm

We had just beaten the British military to gain our freedom (against LONG odds). We wanted to avoid anyone tyrannizing us, including American leaders. Since the central government was the new body in our federal structure, the founding fathers wrote almost the whole Constitution to carefully outline and limit the powers of the central government.

The Constitution was interpreted that way until the Civil War, when the central government forced states to come back into the union against their will. While I am glad we didn't fracture then, the central government didn't continue the trend in any serious way until the 1930s when the Great Depression convinced many Americans that the only solution to the crisis was massive power flowing from the states to the central government.

Today, the central government routinely meddles in areas that used to be exclusively state territory: voting restrictions, marriage laws and drinking ages just to name a few. While most laws used to be state or local, the central government can hardly buy paper fast enough to publish all the new federal laws and regulations coming from Washington.

This isn't the government that the founders created. While that one was imperfect, it was dedicated to freedom for Americans and power for states. This government is bent on imposing national rules at the expense of liberty.