A young libertarian friend of mine Thomas Woods is, no doubt, making a fortune on his latest book, Nullification: How to Resist Tyranny in the 21^st Century, recently published by the Republican-affiliated Regnery Press. Those who are promoting this work are for the most part GOP publicists and FOX-news celebrities. The relevant historical part can be summed up as follows. At the time of the founding, such statesmen as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison believed that states retained residual powers beyond those specified in the Constitution. Among these non-enunciated powers was the right of state legislatures to interpose themselves between the people and a federal law they believed to be improper. The interposing legislature could then nullify what it considered to be an arbitrary assertion of federal power.

Not all of our early leaders believed in such a right; and advocates of a strong federal union such as Washington, Hamilton, and Adams clearly opposed the nullification doctrine. Still it persisted -- and not only in the slave-holding South but even more conspicuously in New England. There the pro-English Federalists, once having lost power to the Jeffersonian Democrats in 1800, warmed to the idea of greater state power, and particularly after the Democrats propelled Americans into the (at least in New England) unpopular War of 1812. Those who appeal to the nullification doctrine have generally been regions or groups that have lost in their bid for control over the federal government, and that generalization is as true now as it was in the past.

Although I personally wish there were more power-sharing among levels of government, I consider the current appeal to nullification to be a childish ploy. Unlike the early Democrats, the GOP has never been a states-rights party.  It became a national force for decades as the party that crushed Southern secession in the Civil War, and then it pushed the federal government toward overseas expansion, high tariffs, and Prohibition. I can’t think of any Republican president in my lifetime who worked to increase state power at the expense of the federal government, due allowance being made for toothless tax-sharing gimmicks put forth by some Republican presidents. Now we have a Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, who invokes the Tenth Amendment and who speaks about state power that should never have been ceded to the federal union. But Thomas’s presence on the court is not the result of his predilection for the Tenth Amendment. He is there because George Bush Sr. wished to appoint a Black who would not be on the judicial left.

Americans are sick of their rulers.  Trust in the Federal Government is near an all time low, and there’s little reason to believe things will change any time soon. The national debt is over $13 trillion and healthcare reform passed over the wishes of the majority of the population.  Everything else that the Democrats would like to do, such as cap-and-trade and immigration reform, the American people don’t want either. Voting in the Republicans, even if it prevents any new liabilities from coming into existence, may well get us into another war.

We’re told that everything would be better if we just would follow the Constitution.  And that’s true enough, as nowhere in the document does it allow Washington to force people to buy health insurance, participate in programs such as Social Security and Medicare, set up a Federal Reserve system, or do a thousand other things now taken for granted as state prerogatives.

Where did things go wrong?  How can we resist the leviathan?  Tom Woods attempts to tell us in Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century.  Every school child learns that there are three branches of government.  The Legislative makes laws, the Executive enforces, and the Judiciary interprets.  The problem with this setup, according to Woods, is that it’s not what the Founders intended.  The arrangement doesn’t stop all three branches of government from infringing on the rights of the states and individuals.

Thomas E. Woods Jr. has just released his latest book, Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century. You can purchase it from AltRight's Amazon store here. It's already in Amazon's Top 50, and if the Tea Parties get excited about this one, it could become a blockbuster. A couple of AltRight regulars are interested in reviewing Nullification ... including yours truly ... there's going to be a diversity of opinion ... I'll leave it at that.     

Anyway, Tom has recently been interviewed by a man who well represents the mental capacity of the mainstream media.  

(I believe that's Bob Murphy behind the make-up.)

At one point in Western history, the "Robin Hood" of Anglo-Saxon legend became a socialist. When Hollywood got a hold him, he also became a charmer and prankster (as portrayed by Errol Flynn and animated by Disney), and later a mellow loner from Southern California in Kevin Costner's godawful 1991 production. But mostly, Robin was a socialist, and a man defined by the imperative of  "stealing from the rich to give to the poor." He became one of history's few universally beloved Leftists, his name emblazoned on various pieces of uplifting legislation. Ayn Rand declared him the epitome of evil. 

Something must be rotten in Sherwood forest. For in Russell Crow and Ridley Scott's Robin Hood (2010) only briefly does Robin actually don a hood and rob passers-by in the woods. (His victims in this case are leaders of the Roman church who had refused the starving population of Nottingham recourse to their grain.) Otherwise, the prince of theives is scandalously upright and law abiding. The New York Times's dissatisfaction with the film indicates that more than a century's worth of wealth-redistribution metaphors have been put at risk. (Or as Steve Sailer puts it, "American audiences ... have been puzzled (not without reason) over why Robin Hood doesn't have much to do with, well, Robin Hood.")