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Joel has written 322 articles so far, you can find them below.
Restoring America One County at a Time Chapter 5: Taxation 5.1 Taxation in a Free America We have now laid out the fundamental shape of decentralized government as it ought to be. The county should be fundamental, and people should have to deal with no government official other that their county officials, with perhaps limited [...]
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There is no doubt that the sin of Adam and Eve was met with a curse from God. Part of that curse came upon the ground, and thus upon our work: cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it [...]
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If we are to discuss how to restore freedom in regard to State’s rights, we have to make some acknowledgments and qualifications up front. Nevertheless, there is work we can do and which needs to be done. Remember that this project focuses mainly on things average individuals can do to restore freedom in this country. [...]
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An important assault on State’s rights was the Seventeenth Amendment. The product of the time when Populism and Progressivism were sweeping large sections of America, the Seventeenth Amendment jammed a wedge of pure democracy into the Constitution where it was never designed to belong. This upset the Constitutional checks-and-balances system, weakened State rights and power, [...]
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Chuck Colson bent over backwards yesterday defending Rick Perry from the dreaded label “theocrat.” He says, “Theocrat,” and related words like “Dominionist” and “Christianist,” are the latest in a series of epithets directed at Christians who insist that their faith is not merely a private matter. Suggesting Christians want to impose biblical law on civil [...]
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In one of those amazingly rare events that keep people believing in miracles, NPR made sense for about fifteen seconds. In an interview with Rachel Tabachnick, NPR’s Teri Gross covered an Evangelical movement called “The New Apostolic Reformation” (NAR). In discussing the most prominent campaign of that neocharismatic movement—the “Seven Mountain Dominion” (7MD) movement—Gross’s guest correctly [...]
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While little discussed in today’s textbooks, Washington held a virtually identical view of government as Hamilton—he was just less outspoken and more elegant about it. Some historians have considered Washington a mere front for Hamilton’s agenda—the public executive counterpart to Marshall’s later judicial back-door. But Washington often expressed views about “strong and energetic” government to [...]
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[To my normal readers: I apologize for the excessive length this time. To the critics: "Ask and ye shall receive" (at least this once).] Criticize Alexander Hamilton these days and about all you’ll hear in response from some quarters is, “Chernow, Chernow Chernow!” By many accounts, Ron Chernow’s 2004 work has cleared away all the [...]
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4.2 How it was lost We have already covered how decentralization in principle was lost already with the Constitutional settlement. It is not my intention to rehash that same material for the loss of State Rights—though much of it is relevant. But we need to know more of the story, and we need to know [...]
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Restoring America One County at a Time Chapter 4: State’s Rights 4.1 Freedom and State’s Rights: How it used to be The last chapter dealt with the primary issue of decentralizing government. The goal is to decentralize as much as possible, ultimately leaving individuals as free as possible and dealing only with local units of [...]
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