Rx: government, 5mcg, bid, PRN

 

Government is best in small doses.  The stereotypical New England Town Meeting may be the best example of efficiently-run government.  A Congress with 100 Senators and 435 Representatives, flanked by a thousand federal agencies, may be the best example of how bad it can get.

A nation the size of the U.S. may simply be impossible to run efficiently, but our national tendency to make every issue "a federal project" puts us on a path to costly, unjust, and overly-complicated government.  It may be that the best solution to this problem is 'secession'.

Perhaps the next amendment to the Constitution ought to be

"The prerogative of the States to separate from the United States of America and 'to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them' shall not be abrogated."

Some will object that we fought a civil war over this issue and resolved it in the negative.  That is categorically untrue.  What the civil war resolved was the truth that an industrialized society has a military advantage over an agricultural society.  Absolutely nothing else was decided.

Allowing discretionary secession would, in fact, have an immediate salubrious effect on the efficiency of our federal behemoth.  When states acquire the power to defund the federal government, that federal government would necessarily become much more attentive to the needs and desires of the individual states — or lose their funding.  Many problems that are now addressed with one-size-fits-all national programs would have to be handled at the level of the individual states, as was the original plan in the 18th century.  We would again, after a hiatus of 155 years, resume true Constitutional governance.