Have you ever wondered who thought of sailing in a steel ship? If for millenia, ships were made of wood that was able to float by itself, who would think to make a ship out of steel, which will sink if you put it in water? This thought no doubt plagued early sailors on metal boats. Sailors are a very superstitious group of people.

The reason that people are able to sail on metal ships is a very simple concept that should (and used to be) present in government – the concept of watertight integrity. If the ship is able to displace enough water, the air inside the boat will be buoyant enough to float the heavy steel. The secret to maintaining this integrity lies in splitting it up and compartmentalizing it.

The air that floats a steel ship is split up into multiple independent compartments on the ship, and all of these spaces are isolated from one another. This way, a leak will only fill a very small cavity, leaving the rest of the watertight areas on the ship intact to continue floating the ship.

Every door is closed once it has been passed through, every hatch sealed, every water pipe is isolated. Nowhere on a ship are there two connected spaces. As a result, a leak in one space only endangers that space and no other. The ship is a coherent whole, moving in one direction, but it is essentially formed of independent units.

So, if our American federation was a ship, the analogy would hold that there should be 50 individual spaces, each isolated from the other. Each space would have its own inhabitants, and they would be free to run their own space as they see fit. Of course, certain policies would apply to the entire ship, but these would be few and limited to essential things necessary to keeping the ship moving ahead as a cohesive unit.

Furthermore, the rules of the ship would require that the doors remain closed so that watertight integrity continues to guard against sinking. We can call this rule the Tenth Amendment. Bad laws that only effect Oregon, are Oregonians business, and cannot harm other states. Also, good laws that only effect Oregon can serve as an example for the rest of the states.

This policy, written into the Constitution in the Ninth, and Tenth Amendments, protects the states from mistakes of other states and the central government, and protects the rest of the states from the mistakes of each state.

That means if one room decided to cut a window, and install a screen door below the water line (lets call it an Obamacare window), that room would be flooded, but the rest of the states would be protected. Unless, of course, the boat captain mandates that all the residents on the boat must cut a similar screen door below the waterline in their rooms, as Obamacare has done.

If one room started taking it’s citizens down to the brig, and holding them until the boat “ended hostilities” with the fishermen, then the rest of the rooms would likely get more paying guests from the other rooms. But the residents of the boat would be able to protect themselves by relocating. And one would hope the captain would take some action to release the prisoners from the brig. When the captain sends men at arms to get people from every room, one would hope somebody would bar the door.

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If one room started to throw anyone who ate pie in the brig, most of the pie eating sailors could move to a different room. However if the captain started imprisoning people who eat pie…well, that’s a different story.

If We want our ship of state to sail, we need to close the watertight doors again. Allow the phone lines to go through, and allow meals to be delivered, but for crying out loud restore some integrity to the ship, and nullify all of these opened doors. The captain should control where the ship goes but each room needs to stop the men at arms at the door, and prevent the water from the other compartments from drowning us. I would hope that the officer in charge of Oregon (or any other state) would refuse to install the screen window below the waterline.

If early steel ships had been run like our current ship of state, I have no doubt that the navy would still be using wooden ships, because steel ships run the way we are running the government would have sunk not like a submarine, but rather never to be seen again.

Nullify DC to keep our watertight integrity!

Timothy Reeves
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