he federal government, the 10th Amendment and why we should give more power to the states

http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/28/constitution-federal-government-states-opinions-columnists-john-tamny.html

Political Economy

Unconstitutional Spending

John Tamny, 11.30.09, 12:01 AM EST

The federal government, the 10th Amendment and why we should give more power to the states.

The U.S. Constitution's 10th Amendment is arguably the most important of all the amendments in the brilliant document that helped shape the United States. The 10th amendment made plain that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

What the 10th amendment tells us is that the powers of the federal government are quite limited, and that any powers not enumerated to Washington in the first nine amendments automatically revert to the states. This was the founders' way of keeping the federal government small so that individuals could choose the kind of government they wanted based on the state in which they chose to live.

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Of course, with politicians on both sides of the aisle driven by incentives that have told them to ignore the 10th amendment, Americans suffer under laws and bureaucracies created in Washington that would not exist had politicians adhered to the Constitution's limiting ways. Simply put, nothing in the Constitution allows for the existence of the Departments of Education, Commerce and Energy (to name a few), government-sponsored entities such as Fannie Mae (FNM - news - people ) and Freddie Mac ( FRE - news -people ), or ineffective bureaucracies such as the SEC and the FDA.

Throughout this decade, under Presidents Bush and Obama, economic "stimulus" packages have similarly been foisted on the U.S. economy by a federal government possessing nothing not already taxed or borrowed from the private sector. Nothing in the Constitution mentions "economic growth" as one of the federal government's powers--the founders knew that with freedom came economic growth--but politicians being politicians, they've never let economic crises of their own making go to waste--Constitution be damned.

Where simple spending is considered, Washington's disdain for the Constitution becomes even more unsettling. As the Heritage Foundation's Brian Riedl recently noted in theWashington Times, federal spending includes $2.6 million for the training of "Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly on the job," $3.9 million for the SEC to rearrange "desks and offices at its Washington headquarters" and nearly $1 million for the shipping of "two 19-cent washers from South Carolina to Texas," along with the improper use of government credit cards for the purchase of goods including "lingerie, iPods, XBoxes, jewelry, Internet dating services and Hawaiian vacations."

Clearly none of this wasteful spending was needed for the federal government to handle the very limited powers enumerated to it by the Constitution, and that was the whole point of the 10th amendment. Washington's powers would be limited so that citizens could choose their governments locally while keeping an eye on their activities.