I spoke to an enthusiastic audience at the Tennessee Libertarian Convention on Saturday, March 15.
I talked about the danger of centralization and why we should emphatically resist it. I compared government monopoly with corporate monopoly and raised the question: why do so many people abhor one while enthusiastically embracing the other? I shared with the audience how nature utilizes decentralization to create less fragile systems, and suggested we should follow Mother Nature’s example when creating our own systems. Then I spent a little time digging into the U.S. constitutional system as understood during the ratifying era.
Form there, I dug into the meat of my message.
Despite this danger of centralized power, the left and right still wrestles to control it. Conservatives claim to champion limited government, but it is generally a farce. In reality, they don’t want to limit or get rid of the power-handles; they want to grasp them for their own purposes. Even liberty minded people aren’t immune. I run across those I call “libertarian centralizers all the time.
They want to use federal power to police “rights” in the states. I think the willingness to centralize the enforcement of rights at every level through the federal government via federal courts is the greatest long-term threat to the ‘liberty movement.’ People are embracing centralized federal supremacy for a few scraps of freedom the powers that be throw at them.
I wrapped up the speech urging the audience to resist the temptation to run to federal courts to address every violation of their rights, pointing out that the Bill of Rights was never intended to apply to state government. Instead, I implore
d them to fight for liberty in the proper venue, and address state or local violations of rights through their state and local government.
