^^^^^^^
CB: "The" State in the US is just as much, actually more, the several states as it is the central government. So, increased central government power does not constitute a diminution of freedom/liberty from power residing in the several states. Witness the KKK which was part of the state apparatus in many of the several states after the Civil War . It was an important part of whatever "re-enslavement" there was of Black Americans under Jim Crow-lynch law ( However, I emphatically disagree that there wasn't a qualitative leap in freedom and liberty of Black people in the change from slavery to Jim Crow).
Most of the "day-to-day" criminal and civil laws are state, not federal laws. Rarely to federal police arrest people for the most common crimes. So, all the violations of due process, search and seizure , or free speech protections ("liberty") are by the individual state repressive apparatuses. Most people in prison and jail are in state prisons and local jails. The vast majority of executions are by states, not the feds. The vast majority of acts of police brutality and murders are by state and local police ,not federal police. It is the several states that remove children from homes, put people in mental institutions, evict people. All misdemeanor crimes are prosecuted by the local and state governments. All traffic violations are enforced by state and locals. It is , therefore, an illusion to think that the central government is the main location of the domestic special repressive apparatus which is "The State". Federal troops rarely repress domestically. The special repressive apparatus is mostly in the state and local governments. The US federal state represses other countries mostly. The Civil War was an exception because it was the only _Civil_ or domestic war.
This demonstrates a bogus dimension of libertarian theory of states righters like Paul. The Several states are more repressive than the federal government , and shifting more power to the states can only decrease liberty.
With respect to Black people especially, it was the states that reinscribed "slavery" to the limited extent that that is true, and it was in derogation of the federal laws - 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, and Civil Rights laws - that they did it. The Jim Crow laws were all state laws. It was the revitalization of federal Civil War and Rights laws overriding the laws of some of the several states in the 1950's and 1960's that made the next leap forward in liberty and freedom for Black people.
>>* *
>>* And the apparently great counter-example - that the Civil War freed *
>>* the *
>>* slaves - turns out to be a good deal more ambiguous that it seems. *
>>* See now *
>>* Douglas A. Blackmon, "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement *
>>* of Black *
>>* Americans from the Civil War to World War II" (Doubleday 2008). *
>>* *
>>* The war, a great evil in itself, led to the "loss of liberty" (and *
>>* life) of *
>>* more than a half million Americans, plus those injured and *
>>* immiserated. *
>>* *
>>* It was a contest between two ruling classes with incompatible *
>>* methods of *
>>* exploiting labor - chattel slavery and wage slavery. The latter *
>>* won, but *
>>* it's not at all clear that liberty did. *
>>* *
>>* --CGE *