i am a soldier from georgia and i just read your article titled, “the antifederalists were right.” for years all i’d known of the federalists was that, when shown in documentaries, people like george washington and john adams had it listed as their party. everything i’d seen on the constitution was produced with the mood that, although there was much resistance and debate during its creation, history agreed that it was right and the balance of powers it created ensured a fool-proof system. for the last few weeks i’ve been in night school at barstow community college, and while i know its not exactly prestigious, its a starting point. i’ve been getting a vibe from the professor that he shares in most of the sentiments of those who are weary of what governments can become if left to their own devices. he hasn’t come out and made any radical statements, but he’s shown early american history from more angles than i ever was taught in public school.

most of what we’ve been over so far is material i’ve never been taught; being that public school history curriculum jumps from the revolutionary war, to 1812 (which is a whole other conversation), to the civil war and then to the world wars. the first few classes were over colonial america and the rise in animosity between the colonies and england, which i was relatively well educated on. the last few weeks have brought on things like shays’ rebellion, the alien and sedition acts (which i had only known of as they were applied in the 1940′s), and in recent classes, the tariffs of 1828 and everything related to the nullification crisis and enabling acts. by moving forward through history in smaller steps than just jumping from war to war it brings on a sense that these things weren’t as long ago as they seem when one relates to centuries only by the major wars within them.

what has been solidifying within me is an opinion that corresponds with what you wrote. the weariness of the anti-federalists towards what the constitution might enable was well founded and it doesn’t take much to see that they had good reason. even in a lowly community college in barstow f-ing california i’ve seen over and over that the very few times the constitution has been used to settle a debate in D.C. it had been motivated by the continual power struggle. the supreme court didn’t use their judicial review to overturn the “writ of mandamus” until it was the only option they had to save face when placed between adams and jefferson. if it was unconstitutional at that time, why hadn’t they overturned it when it was written? this sentiment that, the constitution would be great in a perfect world, but we fear it will only empower gov’t and not limit it, seems to me to have been one of the clearest and most correct predictions in history. but as you alluded to, americans dont see any of this as valid or relevant to today’s gov’t. all of this is looked on as ancient history with no bearing on the problems of today. americans today have it shoved down their throat that the constitution is the greatest document ever written and greatest protection of liberty man has ever fashioned for himself, what is left out of that lesson is that it only gets dusted off in washington, not when the rights of the people are threatened, but the power of one of the three branches is threatened.

the scale of the cultural shift that would need to take place in this country to create a nation that concerned itself more with the operation of its government than it does the modern reincarnation of the roman circus, i believe, i fear, is beyond us. i relate this lack of proper perspective to the decisions i made as a teen, when the full gravity of my actions mattered little because i had not yet felt the pain of the coming consequences. while this ill-fated trend within our culture to concern ourselves only with our immediate desires and to relegate the authority and burden of governing to others has many times resulted in loss, i dont think we’ve hit that point where the consequences are so great that they bring upon a maturing effect that causes a sever redirection in our actions, mentality, and priorities. what worries me is that, in this world, that serious blow to our strength that would usher in a newer, wiser america, might not be followed by a second chance.

That’s a good question that I’m not really sure about. Canada has changed drastically over the past 100 years, but even before that the two countreis were different. Canada took in a lot of American Tories who were quite fond of the British Mercantilist system during and shortly after the Revolutionary War. Canada also didn’t “have any Jeffersons”, so to speak; i.e. there was never an ideological, pro-liberty fervor in Canada’s intelligestia.

Looking at the Canadian state, it sort of nullifies that claims of those who believe that the state only has major growth spurts during times of war and “emergencies” (as Robert Higgs calls them). Canada has just been skipping down the Road to Serfdom with no real catalysts for doing so.

Looking at Canada, however, the impulse of Canadians toward liberty is radically different from place to place. Ottawans and Quebecois are far more statist than their Western brethren; I guess they still have that “frontier spirit”.

Interestingly enough, many Canadian Historians believe that if it weren’t for the War of 1812, Canada would have eventually joined the United States; they believe that (unsuccessful) US attacks on Canada galvanized the disparate areas of the Province and fostered a sense of nationalism.

If the Articles of Confederation were never thrown out, I think that Canada would have joined the US, at least Upper Canada (present-day Canada sans Ottawa and Quebec). The Articles of Confederation had a clause in it that allowed Canada to unilaterally join the US, without requiring approval by the states. All other candidate states had to be approved by 9/13ths of the states. This is quite interesting because such a clause wasn’t even listed for the Republic of Vermont.

Great point on how the Constitution codified the slavery through Art.4, section 2.

The most significant piece of legislation under the Articles of Confederation was the Northwest Ordinance, wherein states gave up their colonies, so to speak, in the Northwest Territories(later formed Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota). When Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance was passed, it declared that new states formed out of the Northwest Ordinance would be free states, with slavery illegal.

Now, one must remember that 100% of the states had to approve legislation under the Articles. That means that slave states approved the ban on slavery! Did they realize that Slavery was a dying institution under the Articles? That Slavery was saved in a way under Art. 2, Sec. 4 of the Constitution? One must remember that NY and NJ still had slaves at the time too.

In this sense, slavery was written into the Constitution. Aklso, the capitation tax mentioned in the Constitution was written to protect slave owners, giving a kind of “free enterprise” for slave trade.

The argument was that Chief Justice Taney has “nationalized” slavery with his Dred Scott decision, but slavery was inherent in the Constitution and recognized as a “states’ right”.

The Radical Republicans of the North stated that slavery was incompatible with republican form of government, and they were correct. But the Constitution weas built on an agreement that was a contradiction, agreed to by both parties, and there fore became null and void once slavery was abolished.

I suspect this was Lincoln’s reasoning when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing only slaves in Southern states. By allowing slavery in Northern areas, the basic agreement of the Constitution remained. By freeing slaves in rebel states, the result would be an embrace of the Constitution.

By making slavery the foundation of union, however, the Constitution was in directr contradiction to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and violated what was recognized as “natural law”. As such, it never had true authority except that which was given by agreement among the states, which was nullified after the Civil War and government by Martial law was instituted.

What’s wrong with Quebec?

When I mentioned Canada and Mexico joining the US, I was talking aobut a counterfactual. A “what if” for the Articles of Confederation. The Canada of the late 1700s wasn’t too different from the US, and that is why the Founding Fathers fully expected Canada to join the US (there was a specific clause for Canadian membership in the US). After Mexico threw off Spanish rule a few decades after our independence, perhaps they would have been Amenable to union.

But today, I agree that both of our neighbors are far more statist than we are. But still, if it was undera decentralized system, where it’s irrelevant how different another state is (after all, one state can veto an entire bill). If the US were to decentralize today, I can see Canada joining, except for maybe Quebec

Do you even know the history of pre-Constitutional America?

The paper currency you speak of was an outgrowth of the war effort. The Continental Congress thought it would be a good idea to print paper money and spend it. In turn, the states agreed to collect taxes, buy specie, and give it to the central government (nullifying the inflation). The states never did so, and the “Continental” experienced rapid inflation. Once that worked itself out of the system, the eoconmy recovered. Mercantlist schemes failed miserably: States tried to erect their own tarrifs, but that merely shifted traffic to cheaper ports! That’s why they had to get together and have a national tarrif to protect the mercantilists. Outside of Shays’ Rebellion, there was hardly any violence, other than that associated with the inflation. And shays’ rebellion was linked to inflation too. Lenders were so screwed by the rapid inflation, they were seizing property to make ends and forcing borrowers to pay up before future inflation hit. Upheaval is always associated with high inflation.

As for the Constitution and when I wrote about de-ligitimizing it, hear me out. We should hold the opinion that the Constitution is great, but the Articles were even better. Just like the Old Constitution before the Civil Rights Acts, Before the New Deal, before the 16th and 17th amendments, before the 14th amendment, before the Civil War and “legal tender”, before Marbury vs. Madison, before McCollough vs. Maryland, and, FINALLY, before the Constitution. Did you even read the legitimate gripes about the Constitution in the article (quoting anti-feds)?

The article focused on the criticism of anti-feds against the Supreme Court. Why on earth should the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT be the sole interpreter of what the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT is allowed to do? I have a pretty good guess on who they are going to favor with.

On another point, how much is the Constitution worth now anyway? I can run through the entire Constitution and find no sections tat are not routinely violated ouside of the 4th Amendment:

1st Amendment rights? – pleez! The right to bear arms? Ever heard of Federal gun laws? Article 1, Section 8, which explicitly lists what the feds can and cannot do? In the trash can of history for generations. The 13th Amendment? Ever heard of a draft? Even the 14th, which is a bad amendment, IMHO, isn’t even enforced. — Ever heard of racial preferences, affirmative action, and progressive taxation?

Ask youself why this happened. Well, The Federal Government had the power to determine its own limits. Not a real big mystery. That’s why Jefferson and others supported Nullification of federal laws by states.

I just think it’s rather odd that the Constitution re-introduced a system that we had just fought a war to break out of! Hamilton wanted to FULLY re-establish the British Empire in American name, with a King and everything. He wanted to completely abolish the states as well.

As I said, the Constitution is a nice document WHEN enforced, but the Constitution itself prevents that from happening!

If you want to read more, read the LvMI Institute Article entitled Rethinking the Articles of Confederation. It dispels a lot of the myths that you’ve propagated here about what America was like during the 1st Republic. The First Republic being post-Revolutionary War pre-Constitution. The 2nd Republic being post-Constitution, pre-Civil War. The 3rd Republic being post-Civil War, pre-Progressive Era/New Deal. The 4th Republic being what we are left with since then.

Theories which base their assumptions on kind of social contracts are just bed time stories. How can Sovereign voluntarily limit its own powers. Same as almighty god couldnt destroy himself since his powers are limited in this respect..

Many of you complain that the Constitution has failed to limit the rise of the modern state. On the contrary, it seems to have been the most moderate of any in the world, and after the others bled themselves through world war and utopian hand-wringing, it has been the U.S. only that has set the example for a return to common sense. If that common sense is attenuated, so be it. But please try to keep it all in context. A brief glance through history or outside of the national borders should be enough to suggest that America, far from being some dangerous behemoth verging on totalitarianism, struggles with its self-image and cuts its own heart out at home before its enemies. This cannot possibly be the militant, nationalistic threat that it’s made out to be.

It is interesting to note, finally, that progressives and socialists like Woodrow Wilson and Charles Beard and Parrington, and the modern Robert Dahl have all justly blamed the Constitution for being a break on the democratic/socialistic impulse. They, like many of you it seems, have advocated for years the overthrow of the Constitution in order to institute the bright new future of leviathanic government that we’re all due. I must suggest that the progressives and the socialists have done their homework much better than many of you seem to have done. Since you Misesians seem to be working at the same purpose as your enemies, and even employing strikingly similar arguments; since you are busy dismantling or attacking the Constitution, perhaps it would be worth your while to do a little reading. I suggest anything by Wilson, Charles Beard’s “An Economic Interpretation…”, the Federalist Papers (Publius was very straight forward about what was intended with and the nature of the new Constitution), and perhaps Charles C. Thach’s “The Creation of the Presidency…”.

De-legitimizing the Constitution is and has been happening for some time. The result has been less constrained government. Asking for a flawless, word-perfect document incapable of abuse is, frankly, silly. There is little to be gained from complaining of a document “flawed from the start.” All things are flawed from the start. The function of the Constitution was to effect to as great an extent as possible a regime-wide education in liberty and order with competing avenues for political and moral virtue. The Constitution would be a new bench-mark to and from which all political and moral questions would have to be turned. Even today this is the case. Even the most specious of political arguments must be constitutionalized and every political actor repairs to the Constitution for direction and support. It is the standard by which all things are judged. Under-cutting the Constitution any more than it already has been will leave only power politics and graft. Libertarian principles will lose that battle, hands down.

Let us think a little longer before we abandon the only check on the government we have.

The Federalist (authoritarians) have had more than two centuries to show us their programs, and their consequences. It seems that there is a growing number of Americans who are disgusted with the growing and (apparantly irreversible) decay of our society and economy under the leadership of these “neo-federalists” and might be attentive to new voices.

Familiarize yourself and your friends with the wisdom of these “antifederalists”. Then help spread the word.

GOD BLESS AMERICA!!
David K. Meller

Why would you care? Other states would have very little impact on other states. Under the Articles, each state could veto a piece of legislation with a single vote (legislation had to have the unanimous consent of the states).

The Mega-Confederation postulated above which would include Canada and Mexico gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I’m from France. The main basis of our laws are the Napoleonian codex. But its the same, this codex is a collection of middle age jurisprudence of in-competition judgements (during middle age, we had several overlaping layer of juridiction, so we had a kind of competition in law “market”).
Napoleon built this codex because he was a dictator, so, he wanted to have a unique law all around his country.

So, positivist law are not so deeply rooted in European mind. I think it’s a consequence of the huge centralisation of our political entities.

To preserve individual rights you need to have a weapons. Only by use of violence can rights be secured against potential threats.

It took several generations for the anger to dissipate in the later unorganized “Antis”. The ordinary folks would remember during political campaigns. Even when not mentioned by the later political leaders, the anger remained. They remembered the American Revolution even if they were not part of the Revolutionary War, and paid the Federalists back with the Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800.

Would that we remember the tricks done to the forces of freedom and beware of a repetition.

Just a thought.
Just Ken
kgregglv@cox.net
http://classicalliberalism.blogspot.com/

I believe that the best course of action for libertarians (and conservatives to an extent) is de-legitimization of the Constitution and a return to he Articles of Confederation. The Revolution was fought in opposition to Economic and Political Mercantilism; yet the Constitution made strong mercantilist corrections to the Articles. Very few people know that Hamilton was actually working to reverse the effects of the Revolution and return us to a British system.

The Articles would have developed into a Parliamentary system that severly restricted the role of the Central government, except in times of severe foreign threat (to play out a counterfactual, let’s think of Napoleon’s aborted invasion of the US).

Other events in American History would have played out quite differently as well. With such a decentralized system, it is quite possible that other states braking free from colonialism in the 19th Century would have joined the US. The Constitution may have well scared off the Canadians from joining (the Articles actually had an exception allowed for quick and easy Canadian membership in the US). If the US stayed under the Articles and never took part in the Louisiana Purchase, it is possible that the land would have been ceded by the French after the treaty of Vienna and newly-indepentant frontier states would have joined the US under the Articles. Private settlers would have probably went West, establisehd their own states, and then join under the Articles. Heck, such an attractive decentralized state may have even encouraged Mexican states to join the US.

A while back, I read “Reverse Revenue Sharing” by Public Choice Economist Dwight R. Lee at the CATO Journal. Lee examined how the Articles would have been reformed and the Central Government would have been funded by “reverse revenue sharing” instead of voluntary donations by the states. Under this scenario, the Central Government gets a defined percentage from State Revenue, flat across the board:

“Under reverse revenue sharing, the federal government has no power to tax. All power to tax resides within the states. Such an arrangement harkens back to the fiscal federalism established by the Articles of Confederation which served as a compact among the states during the Revolutionary War (although it was not officially adopted until March 1781) and was replaced by the United States Constitution in 1789. Counter to almost universal opinion, the most serious problem under the Articles of Confederation was not the lack of an independent power to tax by the federal government. The real problem was that the states were under no legal obligation to share their tax revenue with the federal government. Without this obligation, each state faced a strong temptation to free ride on other states’ contributions to federal activities that provided general benefits–such as carrying out the war against Britain. My reverse revenue sharing proposal eliminates this free-rider problem by requiring that each state share a proportion of the tax revenue it raises with the federal government, with the proportion being uniform over all states.
“

“To acknowledge that a return to the fiscal federalism represented by reverse revenue sharing will not occur in response to special-interest pressures is not to dismiss the possibility of such a return. Significant political reforms are seldom, if ever, driven by the thrust of ordinary politics. But when it is widely believed that the political process is malfunctioning, and politics as usual has consistently frustrated hope for improvement, the combination of aggravated citizens, nervous politicians, and some precipitating event, or series of events, can lead to fundamental political reform. As the likelihood of such reform increases, so do the advantages of promoting discussion on reforms that hold promise for genuine improvement in the political process. With this in mind I put forth my proposal for reverse revenue sharing.”

This both (1) severly restricts the size of the Central Government and (2) discourages state government growth because a chunk of their revenue goes up to the Central Government. I was brainstorming about this a while back and came up with a fascinating idea: What if this process was continually extended down? What if the states could only tax the revenues of counties, and the counties could only tax the revenues of towns and cities? Why, a single state, county, city, or town could vote to absolve itself of any taxes due to government AT ALL.

The result would be mind-boggling: BORDERLINE ANARCHOCAPITALISM EXISTING WITHIN A STATE SYSTEM! As tax-free jurisdictions would be far superior economically and socially to statist jurisdictions, peopel would flock to these areas and more jurisdictions would follow suit (by “opting out”). If such a “reverse revenue” plan was reached to reform the Articles, perhaps this is what we would have now. In the least, it would be permanent limits on the size of government (which the Articles privided anyway).

Let’s look to the Founding Principles as inspiration for the way to our goals.