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Home , Federalism

Federalism and By W. J. Whitman

“I heartily accept the motto, ‘That is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” —Henry David Thoreau1

Anarchism and federalism are complementary . The biggest names in the movement happen to also be the biggest names in the movement. Among the big names that belong to both the federalist and the anarchist camps are Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Thomas Jefferson, and Leopold Kohr. 2 Of course, it is anachronistic to call Jefferson an “anarchist,” as the term anarchy was not coined until after his time. Nevertheless, Jefferson’s ideas happen to conform perfectly to the ideas upon which the philosophy of anarchism is based. Proudhon was the founder of the modern anarchist movement, and his political views are almost identical to those of Jefferson. Even advocates of federalism that do not openly advocate anarchism, like Thomas E. Woods, , and Wilhelm Röpke, are closely associated with the libertarian anarchist movement—all of these modern advocates of federalism hail from the Austrian School, which is a school of thought made up predominantly of anarchists. Federalism is the belief that a national government should merely be a loose of smaller local , established on the basis of a “” or “contract” (foedus in ). believe that the federal government should be the least authoritative unit of government. Authority ought to decrease as you go up the chain. The local governments of the cities and towns are supposed to have the most power, with the “” or provincial governments having less power, and the federal government having even less power than the state governments. Each individual state in the federation is supposed to remain totally sovereign, as a federation is “a state constituted by a plentitude of autonomies.”3 The federal government is not

1 , 2 Cf. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s The Principle of Federation, Leopold Kohr’s The Breakdown of Nations, and Thomas Jefferson’s The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 3 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The Principle of Federation, Part 1, § 7 to have the authority to make laws, enforce laws, or do anything of its own accord. All judicial and legislative power is to be reserved to the states, except for the few powers explicitly given to the federal government by the “” or “treaty” that established the federation. The smallest and most local level of government is to do all the governing. The only purpose of the federal government is to ensure among the member states, provide a written guarantee that the member states will not invade each other’s territories, and ensure that all of the states will unite in defense of any member state that happens to be invaded by an outside power. This, for the most part, is the sole purpose of the federal government. Moreover, the federal government is not to have any standing army in times of peace. The military in a federal system is to be comprised of local militias in the various states, uniting for common defense only in times of war.4 Finally, a system of “checks and balances” against the federal government is to be provided by the states. Each individual is to have the right to interpret the “constitution” (foedus) for itself. If the local governments of the confederated states believe that the federal government has violated the constitution, they are to assert their through nullification. In federalist political theory, nullification is the process by which a state declares an act or law of the federal government to be “unconstitutional.” In the act of nullification, the state officially declares that it will not enforce an unconstitutional law within its territory. The state authorities could, and should, go so far as to arrest and prosecute any federal authorities that attempt to enforce nullified federal laws within any territory that has officially deemed them to be unconstitutional. If the federal authorities persist in trying to enforce unconstitutional laws, then the states are obligated to secede from the federal union, declaring the “constitution” to be null and void on the grounds that the federal government has violated the constitutional contract. In federalist theory, nullification and are two separate means by which the federated states can individually provide “checks and balances” against the abuses of the federal government. The notion that the federal government can be the arbiter between itself and the people of the is bogus: it is a violation of federalist principles. The notion that the Supreme Court—a federal court!—can be the judge between states and the federal government is

4 The United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, prohibits the federal government from permanently maintaining a standing army. irrational and unconstitutional.5 The federal court will always side with the federal government, as it is part of the federal government and its judges are appointed by the officials of the federal government! The principle of state nullification is what Thomas Jefferson and regarded as the real source of “checks and balances” on the power of the federal government. We cannot be even remotely loyal to the Constitution without paying attention to Madison’s interpretation of it, as Madison was himself the “father of the Constitution” and the author of the Bill of Rights. If Madison says that the 10th Amendment is a clause establishing the rule of state nullification, then that settles the matter; Madison wrote the damned amendment, so surely he knows what his own intentions were.6 The power of the federal government is to be balanced by the right of the states and the people to disregard unjust federal laws! This is the principle of nullification, and it is still being practiced in America today. For example, there are several states that have chosen to legalize medical marijuana in spite of federal laws against it. There are also states that have passed laws to the effect that federal laws concerning “gun control” will not be enforced in their territories.7 There is even a recently introduced bill here in Indiana that would declare ObamaCare to be unconstitutional and make it a “Class D felony” for any federal authority that would attempt to enforce ObamaCare in the state of Indiana.8 The state of Ohio has officially amended its state Constitution to outlaw the enforcement of certain aspects of ObamaCare in its territory, even prohibiting the federal government from fining or punishing state citizens who disobey the unconstitutional federal law.9 Federalist thinkers, like Thomas Jefferson, were thoroughly rooted in theory. They held that man has God-given or natural rights that are guaranteed by natural law. The natural law is, according to these theorists, higher than any man-made law. If any man-made law conflicts with the natural law, it is to be regarded as null and void. A human law that conflicts with natural law is “no law at all.” It is upon the basis of natural law theory that Thomas

5 Cf. The United States Constitution, 10th Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” & The Articles of : “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”; also see the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and Jefferson’s Draft Declaration and Protest of the Commonwealth of Virginia, on the Principles of the Constitution of the United States of America, and on the Violations of them (December 1825) 6 Cf. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions 7 Cf. http://tracking.tenthamendmentcenter.com/ 8 Cf. Bill 0230 9 Cf. The Ohio State Constitution Jefferson justified the . Natural law theory means that every man has the right to overthrow his government whenever it violates his individual . Thus, Thomas Jefferson wrote in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence: “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate & equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, , and the pursuit of happiness: that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it…” A person’s civil rights are given to them by God, as a consequence of their very human nature. Natural rights and civil liberties should never be regarded as freedoms granted by the government. The centralized government does not grant freedom: it only restricts it! Freedom comes from God, or nature, whereas tyranny comes from government. The American system has not given us the freedom of speech. Civil liberties are not just civil rights; they are natural rights that are due to us because of our very nature as human beings. These rights are “inherent and inalienable,” and the violation of them is the greatest possible crime. The opponents of federalism criticized it as being tantamount to anarchism. To a certain extent, they were correct, insofar as the goal of federalism is to get as close to anarchy as possible. Abraham Lincoln (who was a racist, pro-slavery fuckhead, by the way) once said, “Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.”10 Jeremy Bentham rejected the

10 Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address (1861) theory of natural law and equated Jefferson’s idea of natural rights with anarchy. Lincoln and Bentham were correct in identifying the Jeffersonians and federalists as crypto-anarchists. Federalism was never intended to be a rejection of anarchism, but a concession to fallen and sinful men. It is often asserted that Proudhon was wrought with self-contradictions because of his federalist-anarchist dialectic, wherein he advocate minimal government, on one hand, and no government on the other. I don’t think that there was really ever a conflict between the two ideologies. There simply was no earlier Proudhon and latter Proudhon, like the earlier and latter Marx. On the contrary, I hold that Proudhon advocated federalism and because he believed that it would allow for little pockets of anarchy. Federalism is not incompatible with anarchism if it is used as a steppingstone on the way to anarchy. We have limited anarchy already. There are areas of our lives with which the government does not interfere. The government does not regulate when we are allowed to sleep, it does not regulate the clothes we are allowed to wear, and so we can say that we have somno-anarchy and fashion- anarchy. The goal of federalism is to expand the realm of anarchy a little further. One of the things that federalism calls for is free trade among the member states, and we may call this market-anarchy. Personally, I have my qualms about local governments. The local governments across America have more power and authority than even the federal government should have. I don’t believe that any government should have the right to tax its citizens or confiscate private property arbitrarily. I have serious doubts about whether or not nullification and the possibility of secession can actually limit the power of the federal government. It seems to me that federalism has failed in practice, otherwise we would not be where we are now. It would be good if federalism worked, then you might be able to establish little pockets of anarchy. People might actually be able to start agrarian and live in peace, totally outside of the system, without having to deal with the government at all. But federalism is not going to get us to our goal of true liberty and freedom. I think we need a perpetual revolution, with people constantly protesting against every single thing that the government does, to the extent that the people should annoy politicians so much that they cannot even successfully do their politicking! Every time any level of government enacts new regulations or raises taxes, it should draw a crowd of angry protesters so large that the politicians are afraid to leave their homes! We need a citizenry that firmly believes that the “government” has no right to do anything, and that will throw a fit about everything that the government tries to do. We need more protests against the government, a coalescence of left-wing and right-wing movements, with cooperation between Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party protesters. Not only do we need nullification at the state level, we need civil disobedience at the ground level. The people need to refuse to comply with unjust “laws” at the local level. Non-violent resistance only works if it is highly organized. Two people breaking an unjust “law” will not accomplish anything; we need 10,000 people united in one place in civil disobedience. Civil resistance requires that you have a large group of people disobeying in unity, and the group must be so large that the civil authorities cannot possibly enforce the “law.” The goal of civil disobedience is to create anarchy in the streets. Ultimately we want an anarchist society. We want the abolition of the state altogether. However, it appears that the state will exist for the foreseeable future. As long as the state exists and we cannot effectively bring about its immediate abolition, we should push for a more federalist and minarchist form of government, as less government is a movement in the direction of anarchism. It is primarily for this reason that evolutionary and progressive anarchists have tended to be associated with federalism. It is not that the federal state represents the ideal system, but that federalism is a movement in the right direction. The system that we ultimately want is anarchy, which means the eventual abolition of the federation itself. The great enemy of anarchy is the centralized state, so the decentralized federation is a movement in the right direction, even if it is not the ideal. And if we can use the federalist principle of nullification to expand the realm of anarchy here and now, then the anarchist should be open to the idea of trying to alter the existing system in order to expand the realm of anarchy even if the goal of pure anarchy cannot be established in the near future. The people need to become more politically active and they need to push for the state governments to resist more of the federal laws. The American monetary system is totally unconstitutional.11 The states need to nullify the Federal Reserve System by legalizing alternative currencies in their own territories and prohibiting federal authorities from coming after people who use other things as “legal tender.” The states could prohibit their citizens from serving in the armed forces of the federal government, and take back control of the local National Guard, thereby taking the power to make war out of the hands of the federal government. The states

11 Cf. my article on The Illegality of American Money ought to go out of their way to prevent federal authorities from doing anything within their territories that is not encompassed in the powers expressly granted to the federal government by the Constitution. This means that the states should outlaw the operation of organizations like the FBI, CIA, ATF, and other unconstitutional federal agencies within their territories, and if the federal authorities choose to still operate illegally in those states, then the states should arrest and prosecute the federal agents as criminals. The movement for liberty will be advanced by a combination of federalist and anarchist activities, with the states practicing anarchistic civil disobedience through the process of state nullification and the people actively nullifying the laws through anarchic civil disobedience. When dealing with big government, we must be federalists. When dealing with small local governments, we must be anarchists. We must always remember that if government is ever a “necessary evil,” then it is always necessarily absolutely evil. The principles of anarchism are implied in the principles of federalism.