I agree that the central government has become more powerful over the years--decades actually. The founding fathers designed a system with a "weak" central government with narrowly focused functions--national defense, maintaining a rule of law and foreign relations.The states were designed to have "strong" governments, providing the functions and services desired by their citizens, to whom they were closer to and presumably able to better understand.

Over time, almost 100 years now, the states willingly ceded their authority to the central government to provide services that the states either didn't want or couldn't afford to provide. In 1913 the 16th amendment to the Constitution made federal income taxes permanent. Between the taxes which they could levy and the fact that the central government could issue debt, and the states were very limited in that regard, the central government got more and more powerful. But our "states freedoms" weren't "taken away". The citizens of the U.S. during that century permitted them to be taken and replaced with an ever stronger central government.

Call it "creeping socialism" if you wish--that's as good a descriptive term as any other. But our government is what it is now, after taking almost a century to get here. To think for a moment that we could ever go back to the system originally designed by the framers of the Constitution is pure folly.

We're facing the challenge of making the best of the government that we have now, make it work more in line with our desires. But to think that we could ever go back to how the country was governed in the beginning is little more than wishful thinking. And to convince ourselves that someone, some political party or some political leader, came and took our freedoms away is totally inaccurate. Our predecessors over the last 100 years willingly permitted our government to be changed--probably permanently.