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Since the beginning there has never been a satisfactory means of paying for the national government. However, because of progressivism, we not only have a bad means of national taxation, but one that strips us of our individual rights and liberties.

To explain, the founding fathers were apprehensive, at best, about democracy as such. They wanted some democracy, but they did not want it to get out of control, like in later did in France. So the people elected the representatives of the House, “The People’s House”; the states appointed Senators; and the electoral college elected the President, who would then appoint justices to the Supreme Court, once they were affirmed by the senate (and thus the states).

Their mechanism of organization of the government was based on balances between groups of people with somewhat different prerogatives, that would moderate each other and try to stop bad ideas from taking wing.

In this idea, the citizenry were citizens of their individual states first, and then citizens of the US. As such, the national government could not “interfere” with the citizens of a state unless the state allowed them to do so. Even the military draft was a state activity.

But the progressives fouled this up royally.

The 16th Amendment created the Income Tax, which meant that, with the exception of Lincoln’s war Income Tax, for the first time, the national government could involve itself in the personal lives of its citizens, without their permission.

Sooner rather than later this would create a conflict with the states, who would eventually use their senators to stand in the way of this tax. So just three years later, the 17th Amendment, using the false promise of “greater democracy”, made senators directly elected.

This both stripped the states of their power to influence the national government, and took away the power of the states to protect their citizens from national government tyrannies directly in their lives. Since then, the people have been victimized by increasingly intrusive national bureaucrats into their private lives.

And these tyrannies always grow, and have never been limited in any real way.