Free The New Road to Serfdom by Daniel Hannan

amendment, as much as any other, revolutionized the relationship between federal and state authorities. It gave Washington a massive financial advantage, and allowed Congress to make conditional grants to states in return for their discharge of particular policies. From then on, states often found themselves acting simply as the local administrators of a national policy—which was, of course, precisely the intention of the Wilson administration.
    In the same year, the Seventeenth Amendment replaced the old Senate, whose members had been nominated by their state governments, with a directly elected chamber. While the change unquestionably reflected the mood of the times—the old system had given rise to some notorious cases of favoritism and corruption—it also fundamentally altered the federal character of the United States. From then on, the legislature was a wholly national institution, and the conception of the Senate as a guarantor of states’ rights was, if not wholly eliminated, much weakened.
    The Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in 1919, established Prohibition. It is a sign of the mood of those times that the sale and consumption of intoxicating liquors could ever have been seen as a proper field for federal regulation. The Eighteenth Amendment, the only one ever to have been repealed, was perhaps the most egregious example of the appetite of national politicians to micromanage matters that can be administered locally perfectly well.
    Finally, the Nineteenth Amendment, adopted in 1920, extended to the vote to women, a less contentious measure than its immediate predecessors, and one that followed the precedent of the Reconstruction amendments that extended the franchise to former slaves, but nonetheless one that reflected the federal government’s belief that it had the power, not simply to define who was eligible to participate in nationwide ballots, but also to lay down how states must run their internal elections.
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    The centralization of the Wilson years was a prelude to the massive power grab of the New Deal. I know that, for many people, Franklin D. Roosevelt is a hero. And, as a British Conservative, I don’t want to be churlish about the president who came to Churchill’s aid when our need was greatest. But it is worth looking at his initiatives coldly, not least because of their relevance to our current era.
    Most disastrous policies have been introduced at times of emergency. FDR, like Barack Obama, was elected during what looked like a crisis of capitalism: Banks were failing and the economy was in a severe recession. Like President Obama, he brought a Democratic landslide in his wake, with the party establishing comfortable majorities in both houses. Like the Democrats of today, most of those legislators felt that they had been elected to do something radical.
    Just as bad policies usually come at times of crisis, so their authors are usually acting from decent motives. I don’t question the sincerity of either the New Dealers or their successors today. Roosevelt’s supporters genuinely believed that they were standing up for ordinary people against the power of the lobbies and the vested interests—a not wholly unfounded belief, if we are honest. FDR was, after his fashion, a convinced patriot, seeking to rescue what he saw as the victims of a failed laissez-faire system.
    The trouble is that the president’s moral certainty justified, in his own mind, sweeping aside all opposition, and overturning the checks on his power laid down in the Constitution. Convinced of his own rectitude, he was happy to exceed the powers granted to his office, to rule by executive order, to sidestep the legislature, to trample on the prerogatives of the states, to disregard the two-term convention, and to attempt to pack the Supreme Court.
    In the name of combating the recession, the New Dealers unbalanced the Constitution, presiding over an expansion of executive power that was wholly at odds with what the