"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
- 10th Amendment of the United States Constitution
What I take from the 10th Amendment is that the powers not temporarily granted to the federal government by the Constitution and/or the Bill of Rights, are the property of individual states within the this nation or, in the case of those powers that were prohibited by the Constitution to the states, those powers were still the property of the people of this nation
The "powers" that this Amendment speaks of deals with things that you can do due to the temporary assignment of your Rights to someone else.
Police powers are one of the more visible powers that everyone has naturally and that have been temporarily assigned to the federal government, state governments, and local governments.
This is because you have the right to protect your own property. If you had to do it yourself, you would have to stand guard 24 hours a day on your property. So, in order to make a living, you wisely decide to temporarily assign the right to protect your property to the local, state, and national governments. They create police departments to do this work. Note also that this does not remove those rights from you. You still have the right to protect your own property, despite your decision to temporarily assign those rights to the government.
All of the Amendments are important but this one is very significant in determining the rights that you have as an individual that are not listed in the Constitution.
This is also a piece of art from the collection I have been using, it simply gets the meaning of the tenth amendment across in a artistic fashion. The artwork says "Amendment X Freedom of State to Determine Rights" with a picture of the flag slightly shifted in the background. This is the last piece of Tony Zupancic's art collection, he just did the Bill of Rights (Amendments one through ten). I liked them so much that I felt the need to make sure that they were published which I did so in this blog.
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