Even among those committed to liberty, we sometimes see people falling to the temptation to use the federal government advance their cause. In an appearance on the MilLiberty podcast, I explained why this is a mistake and why we should focus on decentralization as the path to liberty. We won’t become free through the federal government. The path is found in using state and local power to block federal overreach and decentralize the American system.
“There a little bit of a tendency in some libertarian circles to want to use the federal government to impose liberty from the top down, and the Constitution wasn’t designed to do that. The Constitution was really ratified and understood at the time of ratification to be a rather limited document in terms of the powers given to the federal government – most of the authority was meant to be left to the states and to the people.”
I go on to explain the decentralized nature of the American system as conceived. We then moved into a wide-ranging discussion on nullification and James Madison’s blueprint. We also talked some specific applications of nullification, including stopping Jeff Sessions’ marijuana prohibition and dealing with NSA spying.
