George Leef observes that
If individual states were free to say to the feds, “You have no constitutional authority to tell us how to run our affairs,” there would probably be as much difference between, say, North Carolina and New York as between Iceland and France.
But I think we tried that already. Going past the moral issue of slavery and looking purely at structural considerations, the consolidation of centralized power is why one author states that the War of 1861 was more of a revolution in legal and governmental terms than the War of 1775. Had we fixed the national problem of slavery without a war, as they did in Britain, we might have had a more distributed government at the end of that century as at the beginning.
