Subsidiarity, Where Art Thou?

     If you’re a Catholic, you...well, you might be familiar with this tenet of Catholic thought:

     Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible, rather than by a central authority. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.

     From the definition, it’s clear that federalism – the American Constitutional principle that defines a small number of limited powers for the federal government and leaves all other legitimate authorities to the states – is a form of the subsidiarity principle. Many politicians, Left and Right, have either forgotten that principle or have dismissed it as an impediment to their agendas.

     Which brings me to the following ads:

     You may have seen one or both of those ads before this. They’re impressive statements by an impressive young woman. If the rest of her politicking is as powerful as those ads, she could well be in Congress on January 3. I’d love to see her there.

     But note that those ads highlight the city of Baltimore – admittedly, a city reduced to ruin – and what Klacik would like to do about it. Her focus is on the local problems of a particular city.

     Are Baltimore’s problems real? Yes. Are they serious? Yes. Do they demand immediate attention? Yes. But from whom? From what body of legislators and executives?

     Are Baltimore’s problems properly the concern of the federal government of the United States?

     Baltimore has a city government, doesn’t it? Doesn’t that government collect taxes, fund a police department, and administer a municipal garbage collection program? What are the officials of that government doing about Baltimore’s many problems?

     Under the principle of subsidiarity, the local affairs of the city of Baltimore should be handled by its local authorities: the city government. Under the principle of federalism, no government higher up than the state government of Maryland has any legitimate authority over Baltimore and what happens there. Except in cases of invasion or insurrection, the Constitution delegates no authority to Congress or the president to intervene in the local affairs of cities. Didn’t we hear all about that when the talk started about sending federal troops to Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis?

     But Kim Klacik is running for Congress.

     People really ought to be thinking about this.

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     Kim Klacik is an articulate, courageous, conservative young woman. As I said in the above segment, I’d love to see her in Congress. But the clash between her campaign’s focus and her political aspiration highlights an open wound in the American political system: the loss of the demarcations of legitimate authority established by the Constitution. That wound has festered for far too long.

     Local problems are best understood by the people and authorities of that locale. There is no valid argument that outsiders should thrust their preferences into the matter. Similarly, local problems must be assumed to be the product of local action. Americans from other parts of the country didn’t flock to Baltimore to commit thousands of felony crimes, nor to bury it in garbage. Why, then, are the problems of beleaguered cities such as Baltimore a proper concern for the federal government?

     So many concerns best left to state or local authorities have been federalized, whether by overt or covert action, that few persons even ask such questions today. Consider unemployment benefits, welfare benefits, and educational funding. Consider “revenue sharing.” Consider the handling of tottering corporations, which reflexively appeal to federal authorities for “bailouts.” Do the chief executives of such corporations even consider going to a local or state body before approaching a federal Cabinet department?

     What we call federalization, the Founding Fathers called usurpation: the federal government’s seizure of authorities and powers not Constitutionally delegated to it. The result is what James Madison termed consolidated government: a state of affairs in which the state and local governments are reduced to ciphers before the power of the federal Leviathan. Everything becomes a matter for federal decision making, which means that no matter where you are or what your particular local concerns may be, decisions about what will be done to you and / or for you will be dominated by persons far away.

     The lure is the prospect of having your problems solved for you by others, at others’ expense. The price is the loss of local and state autonomy, which were once fundamental to American governance. They made it possible, as Clarence Carson wrote in The American Tradition, for people to agree to disagree about many things and still share a nation.

     I could go on, but I have other work to do today, and anyway the point should be well enough established by now. Gentle Readers, please submit your thoughts in the comments.

Seduction Into Slavery

     North Carolina was recently in the news for a law the New York Times says “eliminated local protections for gay and transgender people.” I hope some Gentle Reader will correct me if I’m wrong, but “gay and transgender people” in North Carolina still can’t be legally assaulted, stolen from, defrauded, raped, killed, or involuntarily tattooed, can they? All such actions remain forbidden by North Carolina’s penal code. So what “protections” do North Carolina’s homosexuals and transgendered persons lack?

     Perhaps that doesn’t much matter, as I’m fairly certain that smart homosexuals and transgendereds will observe the ancient guideline for the preservation of social peace: “Don’t go where you’re not wanted.” That guideline would seem to apply to sex-segregated facilities just as to all other modes of human interaction. As for the less-than-smart individuals in those categories, there’s the Niven / Pournelle categorization: “Think of it as evolution in action.” Either way, reasonably wise individuals will behave with reasonable wisdom; the rest of us will have to live with the consequences of our stupidity.

     One of the great stupidities au courant today is that if “we” want to mold human behavior in some desirable way, all “we” need to do is pass a law about it. The late, great Milton Friedman had something to say about that:

     The view that if there is a problem, if there is something wrong, the way to deal with it is to pass a law, set up a governmental agency (staffed, of course, by the intellectuals urging this solution), and use the police power of the state to correct it is, as Mr. Simon demonstrates so well, superficially appealing view. It is simple, as well as simpleminded, and appeals to our natural impulse to take personal credit for the good things that happen and blame a “devil” for the bad things. [From the Preface to William E. Simon’s A Time For Truth]

     (Being a snarky sort, I’d have sneer-quoted the words “problem” and “intellectuals” in the above. Being a scholar, Dr. Friedman refrained. Whether he was tempted to do so is unrecorded.)

     But police power isn’t the only instrument at hand. What North Carolina must face is the consequence of having been seduced by federal money:

     The Obama administration is considering whether North Carolina’s new law on gay and transgender rights makes the state ineligible for billions of dollars in federal aid for schools, highways and housing, officials said Friday.

     Cutting off any federal money — or even simply threatening to do so — would put major new pressure on North Carolina to repeal the law, which eliminated local protections for gay and transgender people and restricted which bathrooms transgender people can use. A loss of federal money could send the state into a budget crisis and jeopardize services that are central to daily life.

     Although experts said such a drastic step was unlikely, at least immediately, the administration’s review puts North Carolina on notice that the new law could have financial consequences. Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina had assured residents that the law would not jeopardize federal money for education.

     Federal funds are offered to state governments for a host of reasons. All such funding is wrong on principle. Funds collected by the federal government through taxation are Constitutionally applicable only to activities legitimate under one of the enumerated powers of Congress. The structure of Article I, Section 8 makes that quite clear. Of course, the Constitution is of only historical interest these days, but I thought it might make an interesting sidelight to the issue at hand.

     Federal funding of state-level activities is a reliable technique for coercing state governments into compliance with federal wishes. At this time, the federal powers-that-be are propitiating every activist group within the Left’s coalition. Thus, homosexuals and transgendereds are receiving political obeisance.

     The withdrawal-of-funding club has been applied to other socially divisive subjects as well. A couple of states have come under fire for legislatively protecting the right of individuals not to be coerced into participating, directly or indirectly, in phenomena that offend their religious beliefs, such as same-sex “marriages.” Such “marriages” have been a subject of controversy that has enveloped merchants with no possible connection to it – not even a hypothetical one. States that have attempted to protect those merchants’ religious freedom have been threatened with the loss of federal funds, just as has North Carolina.

     The key here is that governments grow addicted to their sources of revenue. If a state government’s revenue stream includes a sizable contribution from Washington, it takes very little time for the state to think of that contribution as vitally necessary, regardless of the ostensible reason for the award. Money is infinitely fungible; funds awarded to the state for “flim” make it easier to find funding for “flam.” However, after a year or two, those involved with “flim” will howl at the very thought of losing the subsidy. It will become a “right.”

     Two-hundred-plus years of political devolution, emphatically including the devolution of political language, have rendered states and localities incapable of declining funds from a higher level of government. Do their legislators and executives foresee the consequences? Unknown. What’s quite plain is that the funds are always accepted and put to some use that will later be termed a “necessity” and a “right.”

     Federalism was supposed to make this sort of thing impossible as well as unthinkable. So much for federalism. The Constitution, as noted above, forbids it. So much for the Constitution.

     Since 1933, seduction by the wallet serves federal power better than any other technique. Yet not one candidate for the presidency has had a word to say about this devious contravention of the federal idea. Perhaps they would protest that no one has asked them. So much for the trade of journalism.

Quickies: Crisis-Unwasted Dept.

     Rahm Emanuel laid down the maxim “You never let a crisis go to waste,” and come Hell or high water, Barack Hussein Obama will abide by it:

     During a joint press conference with the Japanese Prime Minister Tuesday, Barack Obama used a question about Baltimore to further his views on federalizing local police forces without calling it federalization.

     The Obama task force on policing is in Baltimore along with the attorney from the Civil Rights Division to push his agenda, he told the assembled....

     Barack Obama said there were “too many instances of what appears to be…uh…police officers interacting with individuals, primarily African-American, often poor, in ways that raise troubling questions. And it comes up what seems like once a week now, or every couple a weeks.”

     He got his digs in at the Republican Congress but that’s an aside.

     The federal police proposals from his task force will make a difference, he claimed Tuesday.

     He has invented yet another crisis, using advisors like Al Sharpton, to put the federal government’s hand in police work....

     Barack Obama claimed today that the problem is he can’t federalize the police. Implementation of his plan would do exactly what he says he can’t do.

     “We’re going to be working systematically with every jurisdiction around the country to implement solutions we know work,” he said today. “We can’t just leave this to the police,” Barack Obama added ominously.

     Rep. Elijah Cummings called for a police czar who would undoubtedly federalize policing.

     Al Sharpton, a racist agitator and White House adviser, will be in Baltimore to teach the community how to march “peacefully”, which is merely a more covert style of aggression and force.

     A couple weeks ago, Sharpton called for the federalization of police. “There must be national policy and national law on policing,” the race terrorist said. “We’ve got to have national law to protect people against these continued questions.”

     Remember Obama orating during his 2008 campaign that we need a domestic security force that’s “just as strong, just as well armed, as our military” -- ? Given the steady militarization of police forces country-wide, I think we can guess where he hopes to get it.

Quickies: Federal Educational Coercion

     The indefatigable Sara Noble writes about the heavy hand of Washington descending upon New York public schools:

There are 124 public school districts on Long Island, and out of 101 reporting in, 64,785 of 148,564 children in grades 3-8 opted out of the state English Language Arts test.

     That’s 43.6% of the students so far on Long Island alone.

     Federal officials are looking to discredited test-or-punish schemes as a solution instead of listening to parents and educators. For more details, click here.

     The federal government is mulling over different responses to districts with large numbers of students opting out. Withholding funds is high on the list, regardless of how much it hurts the children or if it is even a legitimate use of government power.

     Another threat being bandied about is forcefully nationalizing the testing.

     With federal money inevitably come federal controls. The money quickly becomes “indispensable” to the states and districts that accept it. The thought of losing it is enough to frighten them out of their undies. Thus, even though Washington has no Constitutitonal role in education whatsoever, by “benevolently” disbursing “educational funding” to the states, it’s become able to bend state education departments and their officials to federal dictates.

     Federal funding that transgresses the bounds on federal power, as enumerated in Article I, Section 8, is itself a violation of the Constitution. But don’t expect shortsighted, perennially money-hungry state educrats to understand that. They’re simply not that smart.

Federalism And The Money Club

One of the segments of Michael Emerling’s excellent The Essence of Political Persuasion tape/CD series focuses on stories and metaphors. There’s a brilliant phrase in his treatment of welfare as a metaphor for drug addiction that I’ll never forget: “When a man has got you by the wallet,” as Emerling says, you pretty much have to do as he tells you.

As with men, so also with states.

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Have a gander at the Obama Administration’s latest attempt to destroy what remains of federalism:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is making it tougher for governors to deny man-made climate change. Starting next year, the agency will approve disaster-preparedness funds only for states whose governors approve hazard-mitigation plans that address climate change.

This may put several Republican governors who maintain that the Earth isn't warming due to human activities, or prefer to take no action, in a political bind. Their position may block their states' access to hundreds of millions of dollars in FEMA funds. In the last five years, the agency has awarded an average $1 billion a year in grants to states and territories for taking steps to mitigate the effects of disasters.

"If a state has a climate denier governor that doesn't want to accept a plan, that would risk mitigation work not getting done because of politics," said Becky Hammer, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council's water program. "The governor would be increasing the risk to citizens in that state" because of his climate beliefs.

The policy doesn't affect federal money for relief after a hurricane, flood, or other disaster. Specifically, beginning in March 2016, states seeking preparedness money will have to assess how climate change threatens their communities. Governors will have to sign off on hazard-mitigation plans. While some states, including New York, have already started incorporating climate risks in their plans, most haven't because FEMA's 2008 guidelines didn't require it.

Now, the amounts involved are relatively small compared to the typical state’s budget. That’s unlikely to make the threat ineffective, for a simple reason: state governments, including those whose budgets balance, prefigure federal monies into their budgets. The states’ budgets wouldn’t balance without the Washington bucks. The federal money arrives preallocated – pre-spent. It’s been that way since Nixon introduced “revenue sharing” in 1972.

So the governors and legislators of those states, having unwisely allowed Washington to “get them by the wallet,” face a tough choice: kneel before Leviathan’s decrees, reduce expenditures in some area, or try to squeeze more revenue out of their citizens. When the state government is Republican-controlled, as so many of them are today, that’s a highly unpalatable menu to choose from.

You might think, state taxation being far less than federal taxation, that citizens might shrug off a “tiny” increase in the state sales or income tax. That never proves to be the case. State governments have wholly changed hands over as small an increase in a sales tax as a half-cent on the dollar. Taxation is currently the number-one reason for personal and corporate relocations, and the politicians know it.

The disbursement of Treasury monies to the states, under whatever rationale, constitutes a club whose backswing no state government wants to get hit by.

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The entire point of federalism – the reservation of all unenumerated powers to the states and the people by the explicit terms of the Tenth Amendment – is that our unum contains quite a lot of pluribus. Quoth Robert Tracinski:

Let’s be two Americas.

That’s what everybody’s always complaining about, right? We can’t have “Two Americas.” But what if it’s not such a bad thing? What if this was actually designed into the original American system and is the way things were supposed to be? And maybe it would lead, not to more conflict between the two Americas, but less.

I know this may raise a bit of a visceral reaction. We’re supposed to be e pluribus unum—from many, one. It’s the motto on the Great Seal of the United States, for crying out loud.

But the Founders who chose that motto in the first place still believed very strongly in the pluribus. In fact, they gave the unum very little to do, concerning itself with national defense, international trade, and resolving a few high-level legal disputes. Most government was left to the pluribus, to the states, to run as they saw fit.

Back then, of course, government was unbelievably small by today’s standards. And that’s part of the reason we ended up messing up this original federal system: the self-declared “progressives” hatched so many enormous ambitions for what the government was supposed to do that only the federal government could concentrate the massive sums of money and power required.

That last paragraph is a bit more generous to the “progressives” than is warranted. Scratch a “progressive” – doesn’t matter which one – and you’ll find a steel-fisted fascist who’s resolved to go to the limits of human ambition and power to make you do as he demands. The word itself should be the giveaway, for if “progress” is not universalized – if there are persons or communities that, for whatever reason, don’t partake of “progress,” then true “progress” is not being made. After all, there are already persons who’ve “progressed” – the “progressives” themselves, right? – so if there’s to be true “progress,” it must perforce embrace everyone, including any benighted types who fail to appreciate its glories.

“Progressivism” is the antithesis of federalism.

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As far as I know, no state has resisted the lure of federal money. I believe the first steps in that regard came with the federal highway system, an Eisenhower Administration project, but the scheme really took off with Nixon’s “revenue sharing” program.

The beast has many tentacles today. Washington has so many money clubs to swing that a state government wholly peopled by libertarians would find it hard to avoid them all. Some of those clubs even take aim at private institutions, such as private colleges and universities. Federal regulation of collegiate curricula and campus life is justified by the expenditure of federal money on college campuses...even when the money arrives as a federally administered loan, not to the institution but to the student.

The game has been in progress for decades. FEMA’s gambit, done in service to the warmistas, is merely the latest of its kind. Watch the state governments, especially those now in Republican hands. The sincerity of the officeholders those states’ voters elected will be tested by this throw, perhaps rather severely. The outcome will provide useful data points for those who continue to believe that political engagement in the cause of freedom is still worthwhile.