thanks obama you r the face of new america .the first black president of super power country of the world who change for the better. We support your health and enviromental issuss of america and world.

thanks
deepak joshee
nepal

Make that 1865. From Joe Sobran's article "The Reluctant Anarchist":

"Murray (Rothbard) died a few years ago without quite having made an anarchist of me. It was left to his brilliant disciple, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, to finish my conversion. Hans argued that no constitution could restrain the state. Once its monopoly of force was granted legitimacy, constitutional limits became mere fictions it could disregard; nobody could have the legal standing to enforce those limits. The state itself would decide, by force, what the constitution “meant,” steadily ruling in its own favor and increasing its own power. This was true a priori, and American history bore it out.

What if the Federal Government grossly violated the Constitution? Could states withdraw from the Union? Lincoln said no. The Union was “indissoluble” unless all the states agreed to dissolve it. As a practical matter, the Civil War settled that. The United States, plural, were really a single enormous state, as witness the new habit of speaking of “it” rather than “them.”

So the people are bound to obey the government even when the rulers betray their oath to uphold the Constitution. The door to escape is barred. Lincoln in effect claimed that it is not our rights but the state that is “unalienable.” And he made it stick by force of arms. No transgression of the Constitution can impair the Union’s inherited legitimacy. Once established on specific and limited terms, the U.S. Government is forever, even if it refuses to abide by those terms.

As Hoppe argues, this is the flaw in thinking the state can be controlled by a constitution. Once granted, state power naturally becomes absolute. Obedience is a one-way street. Notionally, “We the People” create a government and specify the powers it is allowed to exercise over us; our rulers swear before God that they will respect the limits we impose on them; but when they trample down those limits, our duty to obey them remains.

Yet even after the Civil War, certain scruples survived for a while. Americans still agreed in principle that the Federal Government could acquire new powers only by constitutional amendment. Hence the postwar amendments included the words “Congress shall have power to” enact such and such legislation.

But by the time of the New Deal, such scruples were all but defunct. Franklin Roosevelt and his Supreme Court interpreted the Commerce Clause so broadly as to authorize virtually any Federal claim, and the Tenth Amendment so narrowly as to deprive it of any inhibiting force. Today these heresies are so firmly entrenched that Congress rarely even asks itself whether a proposed law is authorized or forbidden by the Constitution.

In short, the U.S. Constitution is a dead letter. It was mortally wounded in 1865. The corpse can’t be revived. This remained hard for me to admit, and even now it pains me to say it. "

Of course, if Sobran's (and Ross') assessment is correct, certain things follow. They follow for us, that is, the most fundamental thing being that the Federal government no longer enjoys what political scientists call "legitimacy", the "status conferred by the people on the government's officials, acts, and institution through their belief that the government's actions are an appropriate use of power by a legally constituted governmental authority following correct decisions on making policies." (Wiki article - "Legitimacy (political)")

And if the "governance" that is exercised in the District of Corruption is no longer legitimate and hasn't been so for a long time, then the solution to this problem is not found in seeking to return Republicans to power. The GOP is, in fact, a HUGE part of the problem, not the solution. Moreover, the solution may not lie in a "return to the Constitution, for the reason Sobran mentions.

No, the solution will require something much more radical, more "revolutionary", in the good sense of that word. Currently, the conservatives of the Tea Party, Tenth Amendment and other grassroots movements are trying to hammer out what the specifics of the required radicalism will be.

In connection with this endeavor to figure out just what needs to be done, I'd like to conclude with a link to a von Mises blog article entitled, "The Antifederalists Were Right." This article illustrates why the late Murray Rothbard, per Sobran, "insisted that the Philadelphia convention at which the Constitution had been drafted was nothing but a 'coup d’etat,' centralizing power and destroying the far more tolerable arrangements of the Articles of Confederation."

Happy reading, and Death to the American Empire - Long Live the American Republic:

http://mises.org/story/2335

obama and his administration are the deathnell of this country and anyone with any sense would realize this.

Get the real news and learn the truth. Watch FOX and be enlightened.

His color has nothing to do with how I believe. He is obviously dismantling and destroying my country at a unprecedented rate :-(

No sure what country he thinks he lives in but the one he speaks of is not my country.