Editorial: The Elusive "Fair Share"

  The Progressives in America have learned to avoid being pinned down to hard numbers and specified limits. They use stump rhetoric, but never go on the record to define what they will be satisfied with.
  This is especially true about confiscating personal property of productive citizens. The class warfare specialists on the left will never actually state the goal they are driving toward. the simply spout the tired old indictment that the producers in our society "aren't paying their fair share".
  There are two kinds of people sitting in congress:

1. Those who love power
2. Those who love freedom.

  The problem is that those power are preying upon the freedom of the others. Economic freedom is under assault by the power to tax. Those who love freedom are often too preoccupied by enjoying their freedom and don't comprehend the war being waged on their freedom, until it's too late.

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Let's start defining where the limits of federal confiscation should be established:

• Our nation's founders did not intend for personal production to be subject to federal taxation. Until the 16th Amendment, federal tax revenues were only assessed upon state governments and foreign import duties. Yes, there were other insignificant revenue sources, but largely, our federal entity was very regulated by our states. In fact, the state legislatures each sent to of their own selected delegates to the US Senate. Until the 17th Amendment, those senators could be recalled by their home state's legislature if they were not diligent in defending states' rights.
• Only defined constitutional federal functions are to be funded and costs imposed upon the treasury. The monstrosity of our current federal government is a horrible miscarriage of this "noble experiment" of a constitutional republic. We have to blame our federal judiciary for this bastardization of the founders' vision. When the federal income tax was first passed into constitutional law, the proponents promised that only those making over $1 million in annual income(and that's 1917 dollars). The masses of Americans trusted the federal entity because they never believed ordinary Americans would ever have to pay a dime in federal taxes.
• The founders created numerous sovereign states. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson and his colleagues declared that the colonies 'ARE' (plural) and ought to be independent states. It was the 14th Amendment which first imposed the federal constitutional mandates upon the separate states.
  

   Prior to that time, states were free to do many things which the federal commonwealth government was barred from doing.

• States funded their own seminaries.
  
• Established their own armies.
  
• Even went to war against other states.
  
• Banned certain religions from being practiced in their sovereign boundaries.
  
• And wholly set the rules of conduct within their domains.

  There will soon be a massive push to allow health insurance companies to offer "national" policies. This will trigger a constitutional challenge over states' rights. It has always been the authority of the state to regulate commerce inside that state. Health Insurance policies had to be approved by State Insurance Departments. State's will lose a key authority when this happens. The 50 current states will essentially become federal counties when this happens. But the states will likely cave in because the federal government is creating this crisis deliberately.
  When the Temperance League pushed for a national prohibition on liquor, they had to enact a constitutional amendment to that effect. Federal statutes would not stand up in court because of a strong 9th & 10th amendment case of federal limits. Only those powers specified in the federal constitution are granted to the limited federal entity. Statutes and taxes are the role of the individual states, for the most part. Only true interstate matters are to be resolved by the federal entity. And now that we lost the institution of the US Senate, states have little real power to put a leash on the runaway federal powers.