Levin: We are Americans! And these Marxist bastards are trying to rip us apart!

I don’t subscribe to the “love my party, drunk or sober” mentality either. I’ve even voted for Republicans before (though not on the national level). I do, however, subscribe to the “rational thought” mentality at all points of the cognitive process.

I agree with you that not teaching civics in our school is one of the great travesties of the recent generation. My reasons for believing this, however, are vastly different than yours. Because our students are no longer taught how, for example, a bill becomes a law, a statement like “I voted for X before I voted against it” becomes a paradigm of spinelessness to be held up to the electorate, rather than a pure statement of one’s willingness to stick to one’s beliefs, even when they may be tested. It also allows the electorate to, for example, blindly overlook warrantless wiretapping while ranting and raving that their taxes (which are, incidentally, among the lowest in the civilized world) are too high.

As for the reasons you’ve provided, while I do agree that the government has moved to a more centralized power scheme since the country was founded, I don’t necessarily view it as a bad thing. More than anything, its grown out of necessity as we’ve moved from a localized commodities-based economic scheme to a globalized information-based economic scheme (cf Jean Francois Lyotard’s “The Postmodern Condition” if you don’t know what I mean). A return to everything that you’ve outlined might maximize the individual freedom that can be exercised on an individual level, but it would come at the expense of the individual freedoms that requires a collective to ensure (think things like freedom of movement). If nothing else, take a look at something like NASA – while it’s not in the constitution, and you can easily make the argument that there’s no space afforded for anything like it in the constitution, you’ll be hard-pressed to argue to people that, you know what, the whole moon landing thing – though it earned us much deserved prestige in the human family – was really an unconstitutional folly that we should have never started. Oh, right, no, you can ignore all of the other competing world powers trying to get into space, let them have at it. We’ll wait until individuals somehow cull enough financial capital amongst themselves and then try to invest it in something that has little to no chance of generating serious economic return, at least in their lifetimes.

(second half of this is forthcoming, but I gotta go decorate my Christmas tree)

Equal justice under the law, also means no tax that is not equal. Nor do I believe that any one part of society, or economic commerce of the country, can be singled out for taxation. Such as cigarettes or alcohol. Its just fine with a corrupt supreme court.