Oh good heavens, Andrew! We know that the American founders explicitly rejected monarchy and created a new thing in representative government, in practice sui generis. At the time the founders were putting together that confederation and then US Constitution, the Parliament at Westminster had long evolved into a unitary government of the legislative Commons with the Lords and Privy Council as adjunct. So in the American republic the Civil War defined States Rights, and the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 effectively killed off Federalist or monarchic notions of American aristocrarcy at least until the Roosevelts, Kennedy’s or the Bush clan.

Governmental and institutional theory is fine, especially when coupled with creative romance and idealism. However, at some point we are forced by the social sciences to come up against the hard reality that all institutional systems, secular and sacred alike, degrade over time. Unfortunately, that very fact is the congenital blind spot of those absorbed in the life of institutions themselves.

So whatever solutions are proposed by the theoritician, however inspired or brilliant in regard to institutuions of whatever kind, we can be sure that the practical and moral consequenses of their postulations will be somewhat different than expected. It is well to remember that over time such unintended consequences may well become greatly different.

One one Andrew’s critics compared air-lifted U.S. aid to Israel with our efforts in Iraq, attempting to show (in both cases) that we can make a difference. But these two efforts are not the same. Aiding Israel when Arab/Muslim armies threaten her destructions is reasonable. We should behave in a similar fashion if Britain, Australia, or New Zealand were threatened. But in Iraq we invaded, not aided. And Israel is a civilized place, worth preserving. Attempting to make Iraq (or any Muslim country) a peaceful democracy is pure folly and hubris. It was never going to go well.

Best to get out and retreat to First Principles.

As an American sympathetic to the ideals of monarchy, would you like to see the monarchic principal established in the States?

If so, how could that come about? I mean, under what circumstances? Who or what could establish a Crown in this country, and by whose authority and what process could it achieve legitimacy? What kind of persons would constitute an aristocracy, and how would they be recognized? Finally, how would a tradition — replete with either a mythology or some other means of giving philosophical and emotional roots to certain ideas/ideals — be formed to establish the Crown as “the font of authority and legitimacy”?

When Flambeaux speaks of ‘monarchy’ I believe what he, like many (perhaps even most) monarchists, really means to say a mixed system of government under the monarchic principal. The most familiar example of this is the ‘Westminster’ system of government (as it has been called) which existed in Britain, at least in theory, until not too long ago. In this system, you have various powers counteracting eachother. There is the Crown, the very font of authority and legitimacy. The Crown shares power with the “aristocracy” (an aristocracy based on birth, yes, but which has always been open to new blood) in the form of the House of Lords, and with the “people” in the shape of the elected House of Commons. If any of the parts in this equation get too powerful, the others are supposed to work to counteract that monopolization of power. Unfortunately, because of the rise in the mistaken view that popular power provides the only form of legitimacy, the House of Commons has increasingly horded power which, more properly, ought to be shared with the Lords and the Crown. It is in the process of abolishing the Lords; after that it will do its best to destroy, or at least make effectively irrelevant, the Crown. Then the monopolization of power in the hands of whoever controls the Commons will be complete. If God is gracious and men are brave, however, then there will be interventions to prevent this from happening.

Yikes! That specific suggestion means a police state. That’s one area where centralization of power would be disasterous

So… getting rid of the Department which is in the process of turning America into a police state would, by your logic, turn America into a police state. We have a Department of Defense (which is to say, a military) to defend us from foreign threats. We have the FBI, state, and local police forces to protect us domestically. Anything else is a threat to our liberty.

With your reply I now see that you were essentially offering solutions to governmental problems based on aspects of the issue of States Rights. Of course that issue is an old bone of contention that will always be the subject of debate.

To say “States Rights” is merely one way of framing the issue. To me, it is not about “States Rights”, it is merely about preserving our freedoms and liberties as well as our security, not to mention actually preserving or restoring constitutional order.

While I do appreciate the debate and theories of unitary v state federated systems of government, I think the time has long past for American States Rights issues to be enhanced as workable within the American system, as such. The mere size and scope of such a project beggars my imagination.

Size and scope? Workable? It is the size and scope of centralization which is astounding, not to mention the stealth and sublety with which it has been achieved. But to claim it is unworkable flies in the face of common sense and reason. Governments of smaller states such as, say, Austria, Denmark, even tiny Liechtenstein exist. Their mere existence proves the possibility of smaller states to exist.

In thinking of that, surely the American Civil War is the catecylsmic event on which all of the issues connected to States Rights and federal power have turned and been changed forever.

You’re on to something here. The effect of the Civil War was to turn a free association of free peoples into an involuntary de facto unitary state. Changed, yes. But forever? There is no forever in the history of mortals.

It would be far, far easier to take that one billion a day we are spending in Iraq and use it to make the USA a friggin’ paradise, for Pete’s sake.

But then who would do that spending? If it were the federal government, then we would all be in danger. For with bribery on such a large scale, they would be able to pass any ridiculous freedom-snatching legislation they could think up. Much better to simply give that money back to the taxpayers. Then it can pay for home improvements and college educations and dental appointments, rather than the attempts by our wicked overlords to justify their rule.

For Homeland Security, we conveniently already have a Department of Defense…”

Yikes! That specific suggestion means a police state. That’s one area where centralization of power would be disasterous…unless of course I was the Reichsfuehrer in charge of things.

But thank you for your thoughtful reply, Andrew. I did not mean to come down too hard on you in terms of social class. A lot of that is merely circumstance and good fortune well met…or lack of either.

With your reply I now see that you were essentially offering solutions to governmental problems based on aspects of the issue of States Rights. Of course that issue is an old bone of contention that will always be the subject of debate.

While I do appreciate the debate and theories of unitary v state federated systems of government, I think the time has long past for American States Rights issues to be enhanced as workable within the American system, as such. The mere size and scope of such a project beggars my imagination.

There was once such an America to which the items in your suggested proposal might properly be addressed, but it has long passed away never to return short of cateclysm. In thinking of that, surely the American Civil War is the catecylsmic event on which all of the issues connected to States Rights and federal power have turned and been changed forever.

It would be far, far easier to take that one billion a day we are spending in Iraq and use it to make the USA a friggin’ paradise, for Pete’s sake.

“What is really of the essence is this: we need diffusion of power, rather than centralization. I admit a certain bias in favor of families, circles of friends, neighborhoods, parishes, voluntary associations, villages, towns, cities, counties, and even states against the massive overarching (and often illegal) power of the central government.”

The above statement summarizes why I am a monarchist. Thank you, sir, for such a succinct illumination of the point.

Nothing, on the federal level.

For Homeland Security, we conveniently already have a Department of Defense. For education, housing and urban development, these issues are completely inappropriate for the federal level of government (they are often even inappropriate for state governments in the larger states). They are much more suited to be taken care of on a local, municipal basis.

You mention, for example, Social Security and student loans and grants. There is absolutely no reason why these things should not be taken care of at state levels.

You must remember that state governments have almost immeasurably more leeway according to our constitution than the federal government. There are two reasons why this is often forgotten. First, the federal government does not actually heed the restrictions placed upon it by the Constitution. Secondly, state elected officials don’t want to take responsibility for the things which actually are their responsibility; they often find it much easier to react to a problem or issue by saying “Washington needs to do something”, even in areas of concern in which the federal gov’t has no constitutional grounds for action.

Another argument for shifting things back to the states is that it provides greater space for experimentation and adjustment. For example, suppose you have one social security system for an entire country. It would be incredibly difficult to adapt and change it because it would require the consent of too many different states with divergent interest. Now imagine that, in one country, you have fifty different systems. If one state has a particularly expensive system, it can learn from other states that are more willing to reform. If one state’s system performs very poorly in the services it offers than it can look to others to see how they manage and learn from these examples. To have just one system, especially for such a huge country as the United States, is rather stultifying.

I think the most important principle here is subsidiarity: that decisions be taken as close to the people they affect. Decisions about a public school in a little town in New Mexico, for example, ought to be taken by the parents of students and by the taxpayers of that town.

the absence of any expressed social consciousness in these pages

English is the preferred tongue of this website. I’m not sure whether this little statement is Marxist or Freudian, as I have avoided learning either of those languages.

It is a byword that the weight of the progressive income tax, or the evasion thereof, falls disproprtionately on the rich.

But the alternative I suggest, a V.A.T., would also, by its very nature, fall disproportionately on the rich (if one assumes that the rich spend more than others).

My fundamental disagreement with the federal income tax is twofold: A) it takes power away from workers by reducing their income. B) It puts more power in the hands of the federal government, which is ever increasingly remote from the citizens it purportedly exists to serve.

Furthermore, to earn money is something that the overwhelming majority of people simply must do. It seems wicked to punish people for life’s necessities. I would much rather have a VAT because nobody needs a flat-screen television or a yacht or a Gucci handbag. Tax spending, not earning! Also, I am told that the VAT would, apparently, help American industry against foreign competition in some way which I don’t quite understand. (Apologies for my ignorance). Income tax, meanwhile, hurts the American working class by taking away a portion of their income, while the portion of the upper-classes which it takes away also harms the American worker because that is money that could be invested in businesses to employ people.

What is really of the essence is this: we need diffusion of power, rather than centralization. I admit a certain bias in favor of families, circles of friends, neighborhoods, parishes, voluntary associations, villages, towns, cities, counties, and even states against the massive overarching (and often illegal) power of the central government.