Jason Lewis’s Book on States’ Rights

October 7, 2010

Last night on his syndicated radio show, Jason Lewis discussed his newly released book, Power Divided Is Power Checked: The Argument for States’ Rights (order book here), and, while I haven’t read it, given how articulate he has been on his show in expressing these ideas of freedom and the Founders’ views on states’ rights, he probably communicates those ideas in this book just as well. (Here are some excerpts from Chapter 1 of the book.) Now, he has said on his show that he isn’t exactly urging that states secede from the federal government’s control, but he is describing how people have a right to interact amongst one another voluntarily, and are not obligated to be compelled to be part of a “union” by force.

In the Chapter 1 excerpt cited above, Lewis has a reference to economist Thomas DiLorenzo, who has written several books about Herr Lincoln and the war between North and South and the Lincoln cult, and DiLorenzo’s noting that Lincoln could have ended slavery peacefully without waging war on the people of the Southern states but chose not to do that.

And Lewis writes in that chapter that motivations for the South’s secession weren’t really to do with slavery, as the popular myth suggests, but more to do with Lincoln and the North’s treatment toward the South economically:

Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 plan for a national bank, for instance, generally favored the North…it was federal protectionism designed to preserve the North’s manufacturing base that had long been an irritant simmering in the South. When Lincoln moved to raise tariffs on those Southern states that were heavily reliant on imports, he reopened an economic wound that went all the way back to the “tariffs of abominations” in 1828.

As I mentioned, I haven’t read the book, but it is nice of Lewis and the publisher to provide that excerpt online so that we may have a feel for the direction of the book. As far as the book’s sales outlets, I don’t know exactly why the book isn’t available on Amazon.com, and, besides the book’s website, there isn’t that much mention of the book on the Internet, perhaps because it’s just out.

Now, the talk show host and that book’s author Jason Lewis considers himself a federalist, and anyone who’s familiar with me and this blog here knows that I am an Anti-Federalist. That’s because I like to deal with reality and truth. The federal government has done no good, only bad, and it is the federal government’s existence and actions that will be the main cause of the death of America, if that actually occurs.

The idea of a centralized federal government is inherently flawed, because, as economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe has written in his book, Democracy: The God That Failed, and in numerous other writings, the idea of a “limited government” is impossible for several reasons. Having a territorial monopoly in defense or other “public services” in which the entire population is compelled to use those services violates the people’s right to choose alternative services including protection. Given human nature, when people are allowed to have the monopolistic power of compulsion over others, they will abuse that power. That is ALL we have seen in the entire existence of America since the founding. And we are now paying an awful price economically because of this current socialist system: centralizing controls in Washington, DC, over a population of 300 million people just doesn’t work. There is no way in this socialist system that centralized bureaucrats can ever actually know the real needs of all the people in the country, and there’s no way that central planning, including in defense, can ever work, especially in a system of monopoly in which the centralized monopolists do not have any incentive to actually serve their “clients,” without any competitive forces.

I don’t even think that secession of states from the “union” is going to solve what is at the core of America’s dysfunction. The answer lies in getting rid of the federal government completely.

FYI, Jason Lewis’s radio show can be heard weeknights 6-9 pm ET, here is his website.