Constitution" Tenth Amendment"

The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution states:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

The Tenth Amendment effectively cast the Constitution as a "Default Deny" policy against a large and oppressive government. Default Deny is a term used in computer networking to describe a set of firewall rules that deny all network communication from anywhere and to anywhere unless it’s specifically allowed by an administrator. Similarly, the Tenth Amendment clearly disallows the government from exercising or granting itself powers not specifically granted to it by the Constitution itself. Those powers instead lie with the state governments and individuals.

The founders believed in distributed government. They expressed the idea that wherever possible, problems and disputes should be addressed locally. If a family had a dispute, the family should resolve it. If a town had a local issue that needed to be addressed, it should be addressed locally, and so on from the county to the state and finally to the federal level. Those most familiar with the ideals, values, morals and habits of the locality and people who are affected by the problem should be the ones to fix it. A bureaucrat in Washington, DC is ill-equipped to rule effectively on issues affecting Forks, WA. A problem should only be elevated to the next level if a conflict arises between two or more families, towns or states. This is bottom-up government. This is a form of government that empowers individuals as much as any form of government ever has. This is the most effective way to manage a geographically and demographically diverse country while maintaining universal freedom and property rights.

http://www.kodewords.com/2009/06/14/sunday-philosophy-the-10th-amendment/