Word: federalist
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Federalism has already proved the most successful of all political experiments, and organizations like the World Federalist Association have for decades advocated it as the basis for global government. Federalism is largely an American invention. For all its troubles, including its own serious bout of secessionism 130 years ago and the persistence of various forms of tribalism today, the U.S. is still the best example of a multinational federal state. If that model does indeed work globally, it would be the logical extension of the Founding Fathers' wisdom, therefore a special source of pride for a world government's American...
Meanwhile, the President's federalist philosophy has pushed responsibility for many government services down to states and cities, whose taxes consume 10% of the typical family's income. Yet the Bush family escaped those taxes almost entirely. Because the President is a federal official, the Bushes are exempted from taxes in the District of Columbia, which would have cost them about $58,000. They declare their voting residence in Texas, which collects no income tax, even though they own no home there and spent only three days in the state last year. Had the First Family paid state income...
...hottest author in Moscow? Right now, freshly minted democrats there are eagerly devouring the works of a guy named Publius. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay adopted that pseudonym back in 1787 when they wrote the 85 essays known as The Federalist. Muscovites are asking the American embassy for Russian-language copies of the essays. Their favorite part: Madison's eloquent description of the proper way to balance local autonomy with central authority. Two hundred years ago, his reasoned arguments helped persuade the states to ratify the U.S. Constitution...
Among other things, there is a growing awareness that too little thought has been given to the kind of country the West would like the Soviet Union to be. A noncommunist federalist union, similar to the U.S. but dominated by Russia? A collection of separate, unallied states? A loose economic community of independent republics, with separate governments and defense forces but the Soviet nuclear arsenal controlled by a central authority...
...those talks, says Georgi Shakhnazarov, an adviser to Gorbachev, "we are encountering the same problems the Americans faced 200 years ago" -- and occasionally seeking guidance from the same sources. At one point, addressing representatives of the republics, Gorbachev read excerpts from an Alexander Hamilton essay in The Federalist Papers to back up his advocacy of a federal tax system under which the central government would collect at least some revenues directly. He was trying to steer them away from proposals, primarily from Yeltsin, for a plan in which the republics collect all the money and pass on a portion...