But "money cruption" is minor compared to the theft, or loss, of our liberties. We should hold all government to a higher absolute exacting standard of the rule of law than we hold ourselves to. A Rule of Law that we write, rather than what a government would write for themselves. We can not allow a governmnet be the master, to be in fact "the fox watching the henhouse". Government should be a servant, or more accurately, a slave in actual fact. Once the restraints on government are removed that government can do anything. And one of those restraints was the right to seceed peacefully if possible, or revolt if necessary, given to us under the right to keep and bear arms in 2nd Amendment.
That is what the War Between the States was, in my opinion, all about. The empowering of a central Government to the point that it becames the endower, or the Master, of our liberties, and not the Guardian, or protector, or Servant, of those same liberties. If the Government can dictate what your liberties are, as a Master, they can then say, as that Master, what liberties you do not have.
And that was in fact what the Lincoln adminstration threaten to do. Even thought Lincoln himself denied that he was in favor of revolking such rights. A right to regulate that was considered as a right of the States, and granted under the society established under the Constitution. The very same Constitution that Lincoln swore to uphold.
Even thought he at first denied that is that he was going to do so, Lincoln in fact did revoke, or rendered as mute, several rights and liberties given under that same Constitution, and thereby allowed the surpression of the civil liberties of 1/3 of his population in doing so. Far more people than were ever surpressed under slavery.