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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.

The founding fathers of our country believed in a small federal government with limited powers. So, accordingly, they wrote a constitution that is short, sweet and to the point. In it, they enumerated the powers and the duties of each branch of the federal government. Then, in an attempt to ensure that the federal government would remain small and unobtrusive, they added the Bill of Rights. It’s hard to read the news without seeing something mentioned about one of these rights. One that’s never mentioned though, is the tenth amendment. Since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the tenth amendment has been completely ignored. As a result, the federal government is now doing all kinds of things that the constitution does not authorize it to do. Let’s look at some of these things.

The National Endowment for the Arts. Sure, the Constitution says that Congress is to promote the “useful Arts”. (Article 1, Section 8) But, the only way they are authorized to do that is by “securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”. Nowhere does the Constitution say that the federal government is to sponsor the arts. Yet, we now have the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) which does just that.
One could argue against the NEA for various reasons. The most often heard complaint is that the NEA sponsors art that is either so bad that it could never be commercially viable on its own, or that it sponsors art that many people would find offensive. A few years ago, an artist used an NEA grant to immerse a crucifix in a jar of urine. Karen Finley, a stage actress, used an NEA grant to produce a play in which she poured chocolate syrup over her own nude body. But, to argue against the NEA solely for this reason is missing the point. The most important point is that the NEA is unconstitutional. If someone wants to produce a work of art, then that person can either fund it or find private investors.

Medicare. Here’s a program that’s rife with waste, fraud and abuse. Fraudulent claims cost U.S. Taxpayers millions of dollars every year. The Medicare system also limits the freedom of our senior citizens to receive the treatment that they need. Doctors who participate in the system have to either follow dictatorial rules, or be booted out of the system. Also, federal involvement in the medical system increases medical costs for everybody. There is no incentive for medical providers to compete for our dollars. Our senior citizens could be better served if the government were to phase out the Medicare system, and allow the private medical insurance industry to take over. That way, seniors could get the coverage they want at more affordable prices. But again, to argue against Medicare solely for these reasons is missing the point. The constitution does not authorize the federal government to get into the medical insurance business. Therefore, according to the tenth amendment, the federal government needs to stay out of it.

Social Security. I’m sick of hearing politicians talk about their plans to “save” Social Security. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that would be illegal in the private world. By its very design, it was doomed to failure from the beginning.
The money that the current generation of workers is paying in does not go into an interest-bearing account that is earmarked for each individual person. Rather, the money is being used to pay the current generation of retired senior citizens. The big problem is that people are now living longer than they did in Franklin Roosevelt’s era. So, the average age of the U.S. population is rapidly increasing. As time passes, there will be fewer and fewer workers to support the pensions of the retired seniors. Also, the fact that people are living longer means that workers could end up having to support two generations of seniors at once. The 60-something generation and their parents could be drawing Social Security at the same time. In order to support this many retired people, Social Security taxes will have to become prohibitively expensive. If we could phase out the current system, and phase in a privatized, investment-based system, everyone would be better off. Retired seniors would get a better return, and current workers would be saving for themselves, instead of paying seniors’ benefits. To make the system work though, it would have to be one of many choices in the world of retirement planning. Competition would help ensure that people get the most for their money.

Even with all these negatives, the biggest problem of Social Security is that universal retirement planning for the citizenry is not a constitutional function of the federal government.

The Department of Education. This department has never educated even a single child. It’s a huge, bloated bureaucracy that spends billions of dollars meddling with local educational systems. As this department has grown in both influence and spending, the quality of this country’s educational systems has declined. Educational quality would increase if this Department were eliminated. State and local governments would be free to implement innovative reforms without approval from Washington. A locally implemented system of “school choice” would go a long way toward improving our children’s education. But, once again, the biggest problem with federal involvement in education is that it is unconstitutional.

There are many more examples of the unauthorized, unconstitutional things that the federal government is involved in. For now though, these will suffice. If all of these unconstitutional activities were eliminated, federal taxes could be drastically cut. This would enable either the individual citizens, or their state and local governments to be able to afford to perform these functions in a much more efficient manner. Yeah, I know. Proponents of Big Government use the Constitution’s “general welfare” clause to justify federal involvement in the above matters. But, if that interpretation of the “general welfare” clause were correct, then the tenth amendment would be rendered completely meaningless.