Self-determination and meaningful freedom at State and local level is contrary to Republican or Democrat sponsorship of a mega-state, which subsumes everything to it.  Conservatives must not adapt Franklin Roosevelt’s own sleight of hand: selling the American people on rights not found in the Constitution—the right to a job, to food and clothing, to healthcare or to an education.  These things are of course vitally important, necessary for life or the quality of life, but they are the province of free minds, free markets and free men. 

 If you want to subsidize education or healthcare, find a constitutional way (through tax deduction, tax credit, or facilitation of choice)—and return those resources that have been co-opted by the federal government to the States, so they can do it.  Top-down bureaucratic control of matters that are local or private or both, is not what the Founders had in mind.  It isn’t what the Reagan Revolution was about either.  The Founders practiced the art of constitutional government, under which government is limited and people have the right to provide for themselves.  Bureaucratic rule always nets less food not more, worse health and worse education not better, and far less of what is the most precious of all and the purpose of our government’s structure and organic law—Liberty. 

 I remember having this discussion with some so-called neo-conservatives at the Heritage Foundation in 1996 when I was awarded a Salvatori Fellowship.  They claimed Ronald Reagan wasn’t a huge advocate of States rights but would certainly approve of the implementation of conservative policy solutions at the national level.  Well, people attribute all kinds of things to others who have name and stature, and who become icons in the public consciousness!  You have to go to primary source material to know for sure.  Ronald Reagan would not have settled for a benevolent master, no way no how, because he believed in freedom too passionately—and he believed the Constitution meant what it says and not only that, was right.  He would not have settled for big government solutions, because he believed them to be contrary to God’s will for our own private lives.

 As you know, Reagan was a wonderful speaker—so good in fact they called him “The Great Communicator.”  So in order to prove these points, I’m going to let him speak for himself by quoting him at some length.  At his Inaugural Address on January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan said, “Our government has no power except that granted it by the people.  It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.  It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people.  All of us need to be reminded that the federal government did not create the states.  The States created the federal government.” 

 He said in 1982 in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “I hope my legacy will mean that we restore the balance between the levels of government, meaning that we restore to local and state government functions that are properly theirs and belong there, and restore to them the tax sources necessary to support them, which have been also usurped by the federal government; that we set a policy that…, barring an emergency such as war, the federal government, like the various states, must live within its means.  And a policy … we [should] begin, no matter how small, [of] paying installments on the national debt as a signal to those who follow, that the national debt is not something [to] …hang over, forever, succeeding generations.” 

 “The answer to a government that’s too big,” Reagan said, “is to stop feeding its growth” [in address before a Joint Session of Congress on the Program for Economic Recovery, April 28, 1981].  He further stated that he sought to start government out on a very different course from what it had been on since the New Deal, specifically on a new course based upon “the recognition that there must be a limit to government size and power; that there has been a distortion of the relationship between the various echelons of government—federal, state, and local.”  To the annual meeting of the National Governors’ Association in 1988 he said, “I can’t help thinking that, while much of the 20^th Century saw the rise of the federal government, the 21^st Century will be the century of the states.”  He continued to say that it was the will of the Founders that states should reassert their sovereignty, and he said, “America is strongest and freest and happiest when it is truest to the wisdom of its founders.” 

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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford.  Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary.  Article is excerpted from remarks he made 5 FEB 11 at the Beltonian Theater in Belton, TX at the Centennial Celebration of Ronald Reagan’s birth co-sponsored by the Central Texas Tea Party and Republican Freedom Coalition.  Email: Wes@WesRiddle.com.