photo credit: Leo Reynolds
I consider 1913 to be a very bad year for liberty because in that year the 16th and 17th amendments were both passed. Each of these amendments is a lever that loosened the moorings that had limited the power of the federal government for 126 years to that point. It’s true that before either of those amendments were passed the actions they authorized were already in use but by codifying the legality of an unlimited income tax and the direct election of senators removing even the appearance of states as sovereign political entities it became nearly impossible to lend any credence to the notion of limited national government held in check by the interests of state and local governments as well as the prevailing interests of the body of voters.
There are many conservative pundits calling for a scaling back of government. From what I have observed most of them seem to want to go back 30 or 50 years. Some may even be bold enough to suggest going back 80 years before the New Deal and the great depression. Very few understand that to truly have a limited government again we must go back at least 96 years to rest the two levers that were thrown in 1913.
Without those two levers being thrown (in 1913 or at some other time) there is no way that our federal government could have grown to completely ignore the perspective of state governments nor to control an ever expanding share of the national economy. There is a decent chance that without these changes the people of this nation would not yet have learned to look to the federal government to solve all the problems that they see around them.
We would still need to address the issues being faced at that time – the government had a legitimate need (as far as I can tell) for greater revenue than they were able to acquire without an income tax and the senatorial selection process was compromised and sometimes dysfunctional – but looking at the widespread misunderstanding about what government can and should do that is pervasive among politicians and voters alike means that I am more fearful of the consequences of our current problems and “solutions” than I am of the problems that were meant to be addressed by the adoption of those two insidious amendments.
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