I am a fan of Roger Simon.  His articles are great examples of the Tom Paine tradition in American political writing.  Yes, he writes as a citizen speaking common sense to his fellow citizens, but he gives us more to like.  His every sentence displays his American sensibility.  He writes as an American citizen speaking common sense to his fellow Americans.

In his recent article, he calls for the abolition of the FBI.  His first words: "The FBI was a bad idea from its start."  Not only is he right about that, but his thinking about what was wrong with the idea is as American as apple pie.  Simon: "Since centralized power tends to corrupt, in many ways, this [the corruption of the FBI] was inevitable."  That's the Founders' guiding thought in their astonishingly brilliant design of the American federal system.  Thomas Jefferson put it this way:

What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body.

And Lord Acton, the great historian of liberty and admirer of the American Founders, put it this way: "Liberty consists in the division of power.  Absolutism, in concentration of power."

The Framers of the Constitution aimed to preserve our unalienable rights by preventing the concentration of political power.

The Progressives, the American left, the Democrats are all about concentrating political power.  Unlike Lenin and Mao and Castro, they did not try to seize power in one fell swoop.  They have been careful to do it progressively.  At about the same time Lenin seized power in Russia, the Progressives began their project of concentrating power in Washington.  They have been at it now for more than a century, and, from their point of view, they have made remarkable "progress."  They are still going strong, while the USSR is on the ash heap of history.

The FBI is a Progressive innovation, and like all the other leftist innovations, it is utterly unconstitutional. Here is James Madison in Federalist 45:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce…The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

That the FBI exists means you and I live in a post-constitutional America.  The FBI has to be done away with.

To find our way back to the republic of liberty the Founders gave us, we must dismantle the Leviathan headquartered in Washington, D.C.  The FBI has corrupted our political system and our system of justice.  The Department of Education has ruined American education — once a shining example to the world — and done so in a remarkably brief time.  The CDC imposed a brutal COVID absolutism that violated our rights and destroyed countless small businesses.  The list goes on and on.  Every Progressive innovation brings ruin.  Their fatal flaw: concentration of power by design.

Much needs to be undone.  If Americans awaken to the necessity and the urgency, it can be done quite simply.  Education is a matter for the states; eliminating the Department of Education would make America better overnight.  No doubt state departments of education would find ways to cooperate and also find ways to innovate not possible today.  Likewise, abolishing the FBI would improve policing, perhaps as rapidly as abolishing the DOE would improve education.  State and local police departments would also find ways to cooperate and to innovate.  Cooperation and competition among the states would lead to better outcomes in every area of government.

If the central government returned to its few and defined responsibilities, becoming once again the Founders' federal government, there is reason to hope it might begin once again to do a respectable job watching out for America's interests.  In any event, because the unconstitutional departments and agencies in Washington fund and empower agents of the Deep State, America needs to abolish them all.

Robert Curry is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea and Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World.  Both are published by Encounter Books.

Image: Tom Ahearn via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0 (cropped).