Why We Need Decentralization - #TSWR
Only Power Can Check Power
Only Power Can Check Power
(Ryan McMaken, Mises Wire) - A central problem of political theory has long been the question of “who watches the watchers?” This stems from the fact that it is generally assumed that it is necessary to grant the civil government a monopoly on coercive power in order to protect the subject population from domestic crime and from aggression by some other state. (Once the civil government obtains this monopoly, it is transformed into what we call a “state.”)
But once the state possesses this power, how can the state be tamed if it then abuses that power? This is a question that has long plagued theorists who have attempted to create constitutions and political systems that would somehow prevent the state’s abuses of power, or provide for some means of reining in the state and its powers, should abuses occur.
In the early years of American independence, this was a common concern.
In 1787, when the American Federalists were pushing for a new United States constitution, they promised (among other things) that the constitution would ensure the government would not grow to the point that it could violate the freedoms of Americans.
Many Americans, however, were skeptical that the federal government needed the vast new powers it was demanding. After all, the new constitution granted new taxation powers to the central government and provided the central government with a means of easily raising armies and wielding federal power against the people of the states themselves. “Don’t worry!” was the Federalist response to these fears. The Federalists pointed to elections and elected legislatures as guarantees against abuses of federal power. Hamilton, for example, claimed that no one in the federal government would wield any powers that were not specifically granted by the text of the new constitution.
Clearly, the Federalists were wrong. Federal power is today far, far larger than any eighteenth-century American could have imagined, and the…
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