Throughout the world, the fundamental problem we face is the hyper-centralization of sovereignty.  In America, the vast majority of problems in government would begin at once to heal naturally if the limitless credit card of the federal government, the dimwitted bullying of federal courts and bureaucracies, and the myopia of national media were not consumed by the cesspool on the Potomac.

When Governor Perry began his campaign for the nomination in 2012, he had the best theme of any candidate since Reagan: make what happens in Washington the least important thing in the lives of ordinary Americans.  That is the solution to our most pressing political problems:  decentralize sovereignty back, where it was always supposed to be, with the states.

More and more conservatives ought to ask themselves what the federal government is doing that could better be done by others

Any currency – banknotes backed by gold, for example – would be better than the Monopoly money issued by that farcical creature, the Federal Reserve System. 

The federal government does not protect our borders or keep out terrorists or wage war to win or protect our intellectual property or do anything but engage in destructive and malicious meddling with the American states and the American people.  It is the tool of angry ideologues and the milk cow for the true plutocrats, the lobbying and government mafia. 

The second part of that decentralization of sovereignty is, of course, to take as much sovereignty as can be possibly transferred and then give that back to individuals or to families or to small communities of like-minded folks who just want to be left alone.  There are a few things we really need from state governments but even states are largely now bottomless pits of over-funded programs doing nothing anyone really wants. 

Even those few things of value that government does today could be privatized or devolved to local governments, which are truly responsive to the voters and whose foul-ups would cause people to move across city lines and cause property values to plummet – creating a marketplace that works even when politicians did not.

It is a stunning and grim fact that in this presidential election year of profoundly disaffected voters, the most important issue, the radical decentralization of sovereignty, hardly registers a blip in the rhetoric of the candidates and federal politicians, and candidates talk as if problems not "solved" by Washington cannot be solved at all. 

What is true in America is true everywhere.  The decentralization of sovereignty in Europe has been profoundly liberating – just ask the Irish, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Slovaks, the Montenegrins, the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians...and so on. 

The horror that is the European Union is held together now by invested national politicians, greedy pseudo-capitalists, and vast barracks of bureaucrats.  These groups always howl at the imagined dangers of decentralization of power because the only value that they have is the calculated and murky manipulation of centralized power producing tawdry bribes and substitutes for the real blessing of liberty.  The EU has degraded into a grinning goblin of that worst horror of internationalism, the United Nations, the enemy of truth and freedom everywhere.

Less noticed but no less important than the grave danger of hyper-centralization of sovereignty is the vital benefit of decentralizing sovereignty around the globe.  Most of Africa and Asia consists of large nations that are really empires.  Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, China, Nigeria, and Indonesia, among others, are empires that have many different languages, many different tribal groups, and many different regionally located religious minorities. 

What would happen if America strongly supported the decentralization of sovereignty in the Iranian empire, whose Persian population is scarcely half the population?  What if America supported the independence of the Azeris, the Baluchs, the Kurds, the Turkmens, the Lurs, and other oppressed subject nationalities trapped within that empire?

What if we supported the creation of small nations carved out of that evil empire as safe havens for the Yazidis, Mandeans, Zoroastrians, Bahá'í, and others who simply want to live in peace in the place they have always called home?

Why doesn't anyone in Washington advocate this?  Why doesn't the left, that pretended champion of minorities, call for this dissolution into natural parts of the Iranian empire?  The left loves to rant about "capitalism," the real problem is rather "capitolism," the complete inability to conceive of any solution which does not come from the elites within the ruling city of a huge land.

No politicians, no punditry class, no bureaucratic legions, no power-peddlers with deep pockets – no one who "counts," in other words – supports the decentralization of sovereignty.  It helps only that least important, most forgotten part of any governmental system: the governed.