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Sure, the founders in 1776 desired a weak federal government. But the writers of the constitution in 1788 wanted a strong one because the existing weak one suc

Sure, the founders in 1776 desired a weak federal government. But the writers of the constitution in 1788 wanted a strong one because the existing weak one sucked.

bluGill 4y ago
The founders in 1776 were happy with things in 1788 and generally opposed the constitution. After reading the articles of confederation (yes I actually did that), there are some things that should have been cleaned up, but overall I think it was a good enough system that didn't need to be replaced.
- tomrod 4y ago
  It wasn't, then or in the 1860s, hence the strong, modern, adaptive federalism we have today that treats states as provinces and makes important things move quickly. One could squint and say states matter today, but that's just admitting a need for glasses. They are ghosts of what they were, and increasingly need to be retired. It will be nice when we put to pasture the policy-as-experiments across states for things that are clearly universally demanded: finance, health insurance, women's medical care, education, defense, gun control, decreased corporate control of the food supply, transportation, environmental regulation, and so forth. It's amazing how much the modern GOP has pushed folks towards this, may they continue their business Republican-led shenanigans to unite the country and encourage progress when otherwise we would be slovenly. Why is this the case? Duplication of fixed costs are expensive. Let's get rid of these crufty overindulgent home-owners-associations-on-steriods and federalize already. (paragraphs 1, 4 serious, the rest in jest)
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    While paragraph 3 may be in jest, the non-standization meant that some states did allow women to vote long before it was constitutionally mandated. Of course it also meant some people were enslaved long before it was explicitly constitutionally allowed.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      Something said in jest may yet contain elements of truth! :)
    - lr4444lr 4y ago
      Same with gay marriage. Methinks the GP is taking a LOT for granted about federal programs being implemented well and not subject to the same malaise of partisan gridlock that prevents them from coming into existence.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    >and increasingly need to be retired. There's ~150 million people that think the opposite should be done.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      Phew, just a minority in the US then that doesn't digest a whole comment. I was worried!
      - snovv_crash 4y ago
        I think you have it backwards. The states should be given more power, and possibly broken up. There's no accountability once your number of constituents exceeds about 1M people.
        tomrod 4y ago
        No, that duplicates fixed administrative costs, requiring more government. Also, prior commentator didn't fully read the comment they were responding to.
        lesuorac 4y ago
        I think you're going the wrong way with this. The problem is that there are too few representatives and so they can build collations that explicitly exclude your interests while still representing you. I think it would be much better to have some dual-system to send representatives to congress where you could either Vote or Petition to get a representative. If you Vote its basically the same as currently. But if you Petition you and ~150k other people do not get to Vote but the person you're petitioning for is your representative.
- bugglebeetle 4y ago
  That only makes sense if you think slavery should’ve never been abolished. How would it have ended under the Articles of Confederation?
  - fwungy 4y ago
    It would have ended because the Industrial Revolution made slave labor un-economic, in the worst case. Modern capitalists prefer seasonal labor for agriculture. They don't have to feed/clothe/house people year round, and have no personal investment. Seasonal migrant agriculture labor cheap and easily exploited, with little legal protection. Slaves, like domestic a nimals (reprehensible as that simily is), must be treated well enough to keep working productively. There is no such need with migrant labor. If they are abused or killed it is easy to sweep under the rug. There'll be new migrants available next year. NOTE: I'm not saying slavery is good, or even better than migrant labor. They are both highly unethical if you consider how corporations treat migrant labor today.
    - bugglebeetle 4y ago
      > It would have ended because the Industrial Revolution made slave labor un-economic, in the worst case. …except slavery still exists all over the place in industrialized countries? There’s nothing incompatible between industrialization and slavery, as myriad historic and contemporary examples have shown. https://www.walkfree.org/reports/global-estimates-of-modern-slavery-2022/ https://www.walkfree.org/reports/global-estimates-of-modern-...
      - fwungy 4y ago
        1) in the USA slavery would have eventually ended due to the economics. Steam engines are cheap compared to human manual labor. 2) Migrant labor is the replacement for slave labor in the USA. These are workers who do not legally exist and thus are subject to the worst of exploitations by employers and criminal concerns. 3) Human beings of all races have a pretty bad record of how they may treat other races/tribes/outgroups. Genghis Kahn killed and raped so many people that he altered the genetic profile of humans. African tribes routinely enslaved each other. Arabs took white slaves. People can be dicks. The list goes on and on: cruelty is a part of the universal human condition. As bad as the USA, it's the only country to go to civil war to free slaves of another race, even if that wasn't the complete reason for the Civil war.
- rnk 4y ago
  The states switched to the constitution because the confederation was too weak and didn't handle or clarify many important issues. Most of the founders were still around. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation_period https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation_period. "...could not accomplish anything independent of the states. It had no chief executive, and no court system. Congress lacked the power to levy taxes, regulate foreign or interstate commerce, or effectively negotiate with foreign powers. The weakness of Congress proved self-reinforcing, as the leading political figures of the day served in state governments or foreign posts. The failure of the national government to handle the challenges facing the United States led to calls for reform and frequent talk of secession".
  - bluGill 4y ago
    The people behind the constitution were not the same people behind the articles of confederation. Yes they were around, but they were happy back on their farms and businesses and didn't even realize what was going on until the constitution was nearly a done deal. They rushed back and eventually came up with the bill of rights.
    - freejazz 4y ago
      And the federalists were correct about the Bill of Rights too
- sanderjd 4y ago
  I don't think this is right. I've read a bunch of people who didn't like The Constitution, but they weren't making full throated arguments for just keeping the status quo. Can you point me to arguments from "the founders in 1776" for just keeping the Articles in their form at the time?
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>But the writers of the constitution in 1788 wanted a strong one because the existing weak one sucked. The founders wrote reams upon reams discussing exactly what they wanted to do with the constitution and how they intended each and every bit of the constitution to work toward that goal. The intent was basically "we need just a little more centralization in order to deal with the truly national issues." The government they created to replace the articles of confederation was weak by the standards of the time let alone modern ones.

Sure, the founders in 1776 desired a weak federal government. But the writers of the constitution in 1788 wanted a strong one because the existing weak one sucked.

bluGill 4y ago

The founders in 1776 were happy with things in 1788 and generally opposed the constitution. After reading the articles of confederation (yes I actually did that), there are some things that should have been cleaned up, but overall I think it was a good enough system that didn't need to be replaced.

tomrod 4y ago
It wasn't, then or in the 1860s, hence the strong, modern, adaptive federalism we have today that treats states as provinces and makes important things move quickly. One could squint and say states matter today, but that's just admitting a need for glasses. They are ghosts of what they were, and increasingly need to be retired. It will be nice when we put to pasture the policy-as-experiments across states for things that are clearly universally demanded: finance, health insurance, women's medical care, education, defense, gun control, decreased corporate control of the food supply, transportation, environmental regulation, and so forth. It's amazing how much the modern GOP has pushed folks towards this, may they continue their business Republican-led shenanigans to unite the country and encourage progress when otherwise we would be slovenly. Why is this the case? Duplication of fixed costs are expensive. Let's get rid of these crufty overindulgent home-owners-associations-on-steriods and federalize already. (paragraphs 1, 4 serious, the rest in jest)
- lesuorac 4y ago
  While paragraph 3 may be in jest, the non-standization meant that some states did allow women to vote long before it was constitutionally mandated. Of course it also meant some people were enslaved long before it was explicitly constitutionally allowed.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Something said in jest may yet contain elements of truth! :)
  - lr4444lr 4y ago
    Same with gay marriage. Methinks the GP is taking a LOT for granted about federal programs being implemented well and not subject to the same malaise of partisan gridlock that prevents them from coming into existence.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >and increasingly need to be retired. There's ~150 million people that think the opposite should be done.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Phew, just a minority in the US then that doesn't digest a whole comment. I was worried!
    - snovv_crash 4y ago
      I think you have it backwards. The states should be given more power, and possibly broken up. There's no accountability once your number of constituents exceeds about 1M people.
      - tomrod 4y ago
        No, that duplicates fixed administrative costs, requiring more government. Also, prior commentator didn't fully read the comment they were responding to.
      - lesuorac 4y ago
        I think you're going the wrong way with this. The problem is that there are too few representatives and so they can build collations that explicitly exclude your interests while still representing you. I think it would be much better to have some dual-system to send representatives to congress where you could either Vote or Petition to get a representative. If you Vote its basically the same as currently. But if you Petition you and ~150k other people do not get to Vote but the person you're petitioning for is your representative.
bugglebeetle 4y ago
That only makes sense if you think slavery should’ve never been abolished. How would it have ended under the Articles of Confederation?
- fwungy 4y ago
  It would have ended because the Industrial Revolution made slave labor un-economic, in the worst case. Modern capitalists prefer seasonal labor for agriculture. They don't have to feed/clothe/house people year round, and have no personal investment. Seasonal migrant agriculture labor cheap and easily exploited, with little legal protection. Slaves, like domestic a nimals (reprehensible as that simily is), must be treated well enough to keep working productively. There is no such need with migrant labor. If they are abused or killed it is easy to sweep under the rug. There'll be new migrants available next year. NOTE: I'm not saying slavery is good, or even better than migrant labor. They are both highly unethical if you consider how corporations treat migrant labor today.
  - bugglebeetle 4y ago
    > It would have ended because the Industrial Revolution made slave labor un-economic, in the worst case. …except slavery still exists all over the place in industrialized countries? There’s nothing incompatible between industrialization and slavery, as myriad historic and contemporary examples have shown. https://www.walkfree.org/reports/global-estimates-of-modern-slavery-2022/ https://www.walkfree.org/reports/global-estimates-of-modern-...
    - fwungy 4y ago
      1) in the USA slavery would have eventually ended due to the economics. Steam engines are cheap compared to human manual labor. 2) Migrant labor is the replacement for slave labor in the USA. These are workers who do not legally exist and thus are subject to the worst of exploitations by employers and criminal concerns. 3) Human beings of all races have a pretty bad record of how they may treat other races/tribes/outgroups. Genghis Kahn killed and raped so many people that he altered the genetic profile of humans. African tribes routinely enslaved each other. Arabs took white slaves. People can be dicks. The list goes on and on: cruelty is a part of the universal human condition. As bad as the USA, it's the only country to go to civil war to free slaves of another race, even if that wasn't the complete reason for the Civil war.
rnk 4y ago
The states switched to the constitution because the confederation was too weak and didn't handle or clarify many important issues. Most of the founders were still around. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation_period https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation_period. "...could not accomplish anything independent of the states. It had no chief executive, and no court system. Congress lacked the power to levy taxes, regulate foreign or interstate commerce, or effectively negotiate with foreign powers. The weakness of Congress proved self-reinforcing, as the leading political figures of the day served in state governments or foreign posts. The failure of the national government to handle the challenges facing the United States led to calls for reform and frequent talk of secession".
- bluGill 4y ago
  The people behind the constitution were not the same people behind the articles of confederation. Yes they were around, but they were happy back on their farms and businesses and didn't even realize what was going on until the constitution was nearly a done deal. They rushed back and eventually came up with the bill of rights.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    And the federalists were correct about the Bill of Rights too
sanderjd 4y ago
I don't think this is right. I've read a bunch of people who didn't like The Constitution, but they weren't making full throated arguments for just keeping the status quo. Can you point me to arguments from "the founders in 1776" for just keeping the Articles in their form at the time?

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

>But the writers of the constitution in 1788 wanted a strong one because the existing weak one sucked. The founders wrote reams upon reams discussing exactly what they wanted to do with the constitution and how they intended each and every bit of the constitution to work toward that goal. The intent was basically "we need just a little more centralization in order to deal with the truly national issues." The government they created to replace the articles of confederation was weak by the standards of the time let alone modern ones.