US Constitution and the Amendments

I
The institutional power that I believe to be the most important is the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution: “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 authority given to states by this amendment was to ensure that the federal government would never get to big—and yet over the years, this amendment has not proven to be a very good safeguard of states’ rights. So many states, for example, are dependent on federal subsidies that they will not assert themselves in many cases. However, there is still some sign that states recognize their autonomy. For example, in the case of the legalization of marijuana, many states have decriminalized its usage even though according to the federal government it is still a Schedule 1 narcotic (DEA, n.d.). Nonetheless, the federal government is not entirely put off by these states asserting their own rights, and all one has to do is remember that the Civil War was fought specifically because the Southern states asserted their right to leave the Union—and the federal government did not believe they could do this. So I think it is important for states to remember that they have rights.
In terms of personal rights, the First Amendment is the most important because it protects one’s right to free speech, one’s right to assemble and one’s right to protest in order to get the government to redress grievances. This is important for people because it is a reminder that the government works for the people not the other way around.
II
The institutional power that I would remove would be the Federal Reserve, which was created in 1913 under the Federal Reserve Act. This Act gave the Fed the right to coin the nation’s money, which is a right that should really only be held by the King—the ruler of the nation, or, in our case, our government. By handing over this right to a group of private bankers, the government essentially made them the rulers of our land. Since then, one can simply look at a chart of the USD to see how it has been devalued through relentless money printing.
There are also so many amendments that I would remove from the Constitution that if it were up to me the only that would still exist would be the 10th Amendment. In this sense, one could say that I identify mostly as an Anti-Federalist and I surely would have disagreed with the many observations of Alexander Hamilton who wrote a lot of the Federalist Papers during the time in American history when men were trying to decide whether or not to ratify the Constitution. I believe that the Anti-Federalists were very aware of how the Constitution could lead to the central government exercising tyranny over the states. Indeed, Brutus No. 1 (1787) wrote exactly that: the Constitution would allow a small group of men to “possess absolute and uncontrollable power, legislative, executive and judicial” over the rest and “intervention of the state governments” would be impossible and even undesirable by this small, powerful, dominant group.
However, if I must pick one, I would be torn to either remove the 19th or the 16th and for the sake of not ruffling too many feathers, I will go with the 16th as in my opinion the income tax amendment amounts to grand theft, as it is a tax on one’s labor and not a tax on what one spends with the fruit of one’s labor.
III
The institutional power that I would like to add to the U.S. is, at this point, a monarchy. I am tired of elections and the pretense of government that still exists. I would rather have a king who is good, a dictator who is fair and just, than this circus of checks and balances that really only serves to support the interests of the handful of people pulling the strings. What kind of a company votes to change out their CEO every four years, with the prospect of ushering in an administration with an entirely new vision, mission, and mandate, and still expects to be successful and effective year in and year out? Yet that is exactly what we do in our government and the idea seems so preposterous to me. I believe this is one reason why we are so divided as a people and I think an institutional power like a monarchy would help to stop that problem, as controversial as that sounds.
The personal right that I would like to add to the U.S. is the right to own property without having to pay a property tax every year. The property tax essentially makes every home or land owner a renter of the government. A one-time tax on the sale of property should be sufficient, but our personal right to own property is negated by this property tax as it is effected every year that we own property. Every year we are reminded that if we want to own property we are going to have to cough up a portion of our wealth in order to do so. It is no different from renting, which sees that if a person wants shelter he is going to have to pay a portion of his money to a landlord. In the case of owning property, the government acts as the landlord and just lets us think that we own our property thanks to a title deed that we hold onto. I can see why government would want this tax—because they need money to fund all their entitlement programs—but if people just took care of themselves, we wouldn’t even need these programs.
References
Brutus No. 1. (1787). Constitution. Retrieved from
http://www.constitution.org/afp/brutus01.htm
DEA. (n.d.). Drug scheduling. Retrieved from https://www.dea.gov/druginfo/ds.shtml
U.S Const. amend. I.
U.S. Const. amend. X