Amendment Ten: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The final amendment in The Bill of Rights is by far the broadest reaching. It states that anything not covered in The Constitution as being overseen by the federal government will be overseen by each state individually. This was put in place for two reasons. First, though they had banded together to fight the war for independence, the colonies had, for the most part, functioned as independent entities prior to that point, much like the countries of Europe. Second, having just come out from under the rule of an absent and out-of-touch monarch, they sought to prevent a government with absolute power.
As Americans more than two hundred years later, and exactly a hundred years since the last state was added to the continental U.S. (Arizona, in 1912), the landscape of our country, and the world, is decidedly different now than it once was. When the fathers put pen to paper, they had no way of knowing that The United States would one day extend across the entirety of the continent, encompassing the majority of North America. That’s a reasonable thing to have missed, given how fragile and shaky their initial status was at the time.
What’s unreasonable for them to have missed, however, is that it was only by standing together, united, that they were able to form a union at all. It was an unfortunate oversight, caused mostly by foolish human pride and the remnants of the British hierarchical mentality, that led them to miss the fact that unity does much more good than harm. A stable, centralized government was what led to the golden age of the Roman Empire and it was only when the divisive corruption and in-fighting took hold, fostered by greed and a lust for power, that it began to fall.
Instead, they allowed their fear to take control and tried to keep the federal government as small as possible, while bolstering the size of the state government. The problem is that they actually did a really good job of compensating for that when they created the federal government. The system of federal checks and balances was a masterful way to both ensure that the federal government couldn’t become a dictatorship and guarantee that each state had a say in how the country was run. The bicameral legislative branch was built in such a way as to give each state a voice in how the country was run.
The problem with the way the amendment was laid out was that it specifically said that any power not specifically delegated to the federal government was given to the states. That meant that programs that would arise later, like the public education system, often went uncovered and led to huge gaps between states and costly, needless bureaucratic additions that ended up hurting both the states and their citizens.
To use the education system as an example, as it’s the one with which I am most familiar and stands as one of the best when it comes to how the amendment dropped the ball, the efficacy of the American education system is spotty, at best. The reason for this, among many others, is that the states are almost solely responsible for paying for it and overseeing it. Let’s contrast the model as it stands and one under a unified federal statute.
As it stands, the requirements to teach vary from state to state, with some being very high, as they should be, and others shamefully low. As well, the quality of public schools in some states and areas is far superior to others, as they have more tax dollars to spend. That means that a student who has the unfortunate luck to be born in a low-performing state stands a much greater chance of being a burden on the system later in life than one born in a high-performing state, thus making everyone else shoulder the burden through the welfare system. Finally, though most states will cut education first in favor of road construction, commerce protection and things like that, which should fall under the state umbrella, that leads to lower productivity in the long run for that state as their workforce will become progressively less educated and will therefore make less money, which means they will pay less into the system, which will then cut back more, on and on in a vicious, downward spiral.
Instead, the burden of funding and overseeing the American education system should fall on the federal government, as it does in most other first-world and developing nations. If that were the case, the department of education, a solvent, well-functioning branches of the federal government, even in these trying times, would be able to set teacher certification standards and allow national licensing, meaning that skilled teachers in one state would be able to move freely where they were needed without any unreasonable burden (as it stands now, a teacher licensed in all fifty states would have to pay close to $15,000 to have that freedom).
It would also mean that a student from a low-income state like Louisiana or Alabama would receive the same quality of education as one from a high-income state like Texas or California. This leveled playing field would make the work force more capable overall and thereby increase the kind of healthy competition is the basis of a capitalist economy. It’s been shown conclusively that the better an education one receives at the K-12 level, the more productive a person is likely to be and, therefore, the less likely they are to be a drain on society.
Which leads to the final benefit, and the one which should be most appealing to the average citizen; it would, in two ways, make life better. First, it would remove the burden from the state government, both financially and bureaucratically. That means they could put more time and money towards fixing the things they should be taking care of. Second, because it would make a more well-prepared workforce, the burden of the federal welfare system would decrease in a decade or two, and continue to decline, thus alleviating some of that burden.
So why don’t we do this, when all research and basic reasoning says it would lead to all these wonderful things? The same reason the founding fathers had. We’re afraid of indoctrination. I suppose that was a somewhat valid fear at its inception, but it’s become incredibly outdated now. First, if we’re being honest, the prevalence of mass media makes the argument pointless. We’re already being indoctrinated, every minute of every day that we spend in front of an electronic device, with whatever agenda is being put forth by the things we’re watching or reading. Second, we’re way past the point where states should be competing with one another. Corporations extend across state lines, so, too, should their workers.
What it all boils down to is this simple, irrefutable fact: we’re better off working together than constantly competing against one another. Let the businesses compete, that’s a good thing on any level, but the nation should be working toward being better as a whole. That, in essence, was the entire point of what the founding fathers were getting at in the first place with this bold new notion. We are capable, when standing as one country, of changing the world. We’ve done it before. But we must let go of the old ways in order to do that now.
The overarching message of this whole essay, I suppose, was just that. We need to look at our past successes and our past failures in the same light. We need to shed the mistakes, the useless bits, and continue to move forward with the courage and strength that the founding fathers, in their wisdom, allowed us to possess. Most importantly, we must grow and change with time and innovation, letting go of things just because they have always been, much as the fathers chose to do. It’s scary to blaze new trails, but it’s something for which we, as Americans, have shown great aptitude and which our Constitution, as a living document, was made to allow.
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