American Death Watch

Some writers and pundits have come to the conclusion that American freedom has been mortally wounded.  With the absurd opinion from the Supreme Court on Obamacare and its denial of Arizona's ability to defend itself from a tide of illegal immigrants, the country may have passed a boundary from which it cannot recover.

Geoffrey P. Hunt believes that the 10th Amendment, guaranteeing the right of states to control undelegated powers, is a dead letter.  At the American Thinker, his essay It's Slipping Away states:

It surely seems like reliance on the High Court to affirm the Constitution's framework for divided power -- limited enumerated authority conferred to the central government with most rights reserved for the States and the people -- is slipping away. Nullification of the 10th Amendment -- "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" -- has been creeping up since Woodrow Wilson and the first wave of Progressives commenced their assault on the Constitution. Progressives using fairness and equality as more noble ambitions for this nation in place of liberty and opportunity have gradually won over the court of public opinion and affection. The 10th Amendment is now as diminished and irrelevant as the 3rd Amendment, prohibiting the quartering of troops in private homes.

His conclusions are accurate:

It surely seems like reliance on the High Court to affirm the Constitution's framework for divided power -- limited enumerated authority conferred to the central government with most rights reserved for the States and the people -- is slipping away....Yes, it is slipping away. The final resting place for this most disagreeable journey will be the fate of all collectivist societies -- poverty and squalor. Friederick Hayek best expressed these futures in "The Road to Serfdom." But why study and work hard to avoid Hayek's bleak vision when it's easier to be dependent on the welfare state, all financed by someone else's largesse? Until the money runs out, of course, which it always does.

Mark Steyn shares Hunt's pessimism. In his article at National Review Online, Steyn has written an article appropriately titled American Twilight.  Reflecting on the Supremes' Obamacare decision, he writes:

In recent years, speaking to audiences hither and yon, I’m wont to say something on the lines of “The lamps are going out on liberty all over the world.” It’s my update on a famous observation by Edward Grey, British foreign secretary on the eve of the Great War. In August 1914, Sir Edward stood at his window in the summer dusk, and said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe.” He was speaking metaphorically...Metaphorically speaking, the lights of liberty were certainly dimmed by Roberts’s hideously convoluted Supreme Court decision...

Underscoring the analogy, Steyn notes that our once great superpower can't even get the lights back on in Washington following the huge power outage there last week. We're broke, and one of my childhood homes, Stockton, California is the biggest city to declare bankruptcy.  Under socialist statism, the money always runs out, sooner or later. He notes:

It was a reminder, as if you needed one, that in the American twilight the lights will be going out literally. Last week, as the East Coast was fading to black, the West Coast was sinking deeper into the red: Stockton, Calif., became the largest U.S. city to date to file forbankruptcy . America is seizing up before our eyes, and the action necessary to reverse the sclerosis is stymied at every turn by rapacious unions, government micro-regulators, dependency-spreading social engineers, and crony capitalists who know how to weave their way through the bureaucracy.

Socialism always produces poverty and squalor.  Under socialism, the average citizen's life will be less, not more. We are passing a point where the only solution to this new form of fascism may be radical:  nullification by a state or group of states acting in concert, or even secession.