Don't "improve" it, REMOVE IT!

When Alexander Hamilton wrote the Federalist #17 to the people of New York on December 5, 1787, he promised them that under the proposed constitution the federal government would never interfere with the “administration of private justice between the citizens of the same State, the supervision of agriculture and of other concerns of a similar nature.” Hamilton thought those matters would be left to the states since they would “contribute nothing to the dignity, to the importance, or to the splendor of the national government.”

Hamilton had not a clue that by 1862 Abraham Lincoln would create the Department of Agriculture as an independent department of the federal government, and that by 1889 Grover Cleveland would give it Cabinet status. By 1914 the federal government was pouring money into all sorts of agricultural cooperative and extension programs in every county in every state in America. By 1933, the Department of Agriculture was paying farmers not to farm, a consequence of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. Even though the Supreme Court ruled in 1936 that regulation of agriculture was a state power and not a federal one, the busy bees in the federal leviathan tried again with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, and we’ve been paying farmers not to farm ever since—currently to the tune of twenty billion dollars annually.

In 1941 an Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, grew more wheat than the law allowed him to and he was fined $117.11. He took the case all the way to the Supreme Court (Wickard v. Filburn, 317 US 111) and lost because the Court shoehorned the case into a matter of interstate commerce, which the constitution does allow the federal government to regulate.

It was an awful decision. The court said that even though Filburn was growing wheat for his own animals and not selling it across state lines (not selling it at all, actually), it indirectly affected interstate commerce because Filburn was not purchasing wheat for his animals and that failure to purchase affected interstate markets. The decision opened a legal Pandora’s box, because now virtually any economic activity could be construed as affecting interstate commerce, therefore the federal government could control and regulate economic activity.

Hamilton, Madison, and Jay would be horrified to see how the Supreme Court has virtually shredded the constitution with boneheaded decisions such as these, the executive and legislative branches going along as willing conspirators.

This is the problem with the federal government: it is totally out of control, having usurped powers the constitution reserves to the states. It’s not enough to scale back these unconstitutional Cabinet departments and federal regulatory agencies—they have to be completely eliminated, the programs shut down, the workers let go, the buildings and the assets sold, the lands turned back over to the states.

The best use of the federal legislative branch would be to declare a two-year moratorium on new legislation, and spend the next two years repealing all the legislation that usurps the power and rights of the states.

Don’t let the politicians bamboozle you: we don’t need to improve these agencies and departments, we need to eliminate them. Totally. We don’t need to reduce waste, fraud and abuse—we need to surgically remove it by fully dismantling these unconstitutional cancers.

Someone might ask, “but what if we need some of these programs?” Fine. Let your state and your local government handle it, but don’t saddle the taxpayers in the other forty-nine states with your pet programs.