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Why are states the magical unit? How about towns? Neighborhoods? Around banks? This was the situation before the republicans created a national currency during
by toddh 15y ago
Why are states the magical unit? How about towns? Neighborhoods? Around banks? This was the situation before the republicans created a national currency during the civil war. Isn't attaching currencies to physical locations a little old fashioned?
- lucasjung 15y agoStates are sovereign entities, the others are not. However, under the Constitution states give up some of their sovereign rights, among them the right to mint their own currency.
- toddh 15y agoStates were sovereign entities before the Constitution. Now power is derived from the people, not states.
- lucasjung 15y agoThat is orthogonal to the issue of sovereignty; in fact, many of the framers firmly believed at all political power is derived from the consent of the governed, regardless of the form of government. They wanted to build a government where that consent is given through ballots rather than taken through coercion. The states are sovereign entities, and one of the most important features of the Constitution is that it preserved their sovereignty even as it subsumed them into a single nation. That is what the word "federal" means: a single nation made up of many sovereign states.