It starts.

Walter E. Williams, economics professor and Townhall columnist, wrote a piece published today about various states debating and passing legislation reasserting the right to limited sovereignty under the 10th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Though he makes a great comparison between the abuses Americans suffered while still a British colony under King George III, and Americans today suffer under an increasingly despotic legislature and judiciary, I can't help but think that so starts a second Civil War.

And I can't help but think back to our first one, where most of a generation of men were maimed or killed. States' rights was what the initial argument was about--a state's right to declare as a slave or free state as it entered the Union.

Granted, that was a bad argument. We look back now, from our pinnacle of moral superiority, and declare that no state should have allowed slavery, without looking at it through the perspective of the times--and through the perspective that the South was falling behind economically to such a degree that slavery likely wouldn't have lasted beyond another generation or two anyway.

The argument that will split the nation today is, once again, about economics and morals. Simply put, the fight today is about Capitalism v. Marxism: personal property v. providing for everyone equally regardless of how hard they're willing to work, and is, at its base, about whether the federal government has the moral right to take money from the few who achieve much to give to the many who work little (or not at all) and achieve less.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, permits for taxes to be collected "to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States." (It also says, right in the same clause, that all federal taxes are to be uniform--in other words, not only are the special, 90% tax levied on AIG executive bonuses unconstitutional, progressive federal income tax could be argued that way, as well.)

There is nothing, not one word, in the constitution that could be read as permitting the redistribution of wealth from those who've earned or inherited it to those who have not.

I guess that's why our current POTUS said that the Constitution was a good, but "deeply flawed" document: obviously, Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto is a better document, if one wants to seize personally owned and held property--and what is a publicly traded company but one that's personally owned and held by many?--to redistribute the money involved. To "spread the wealth."

"Cap and trade" legislation, legislation intended to limit "carbon" emission, is not so openly intended to have the same effect. However, what will eventually happen there is that the companies so taxed will pass their costs on to the consumers: they'll cut jobs and raise prices to offset the "carbon offsets."

Not the effect that the POTUS would like to see. But that's why they call it "the law of unintended consequences."

Much like the coming civil war.

Only this time, the secessionists will more likely have the United States Armed Forces, whose oath is to defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic, on their side.

After all, the current administration--almost all of it--is violating the Constitution, and the duly ratified amendments thereto, right and left.