An underlying historical force moves governments to ever greater centralization. The trend is such that we will look wistfully back to the New Deal era as a model of self-government.
That force is transportation.
The very idea that most governance could be done at the state level relied in part in the high cost of changing states. With ease of transport people can arbitrage away the costs and benefits of government services. Work in a low tax state while young and healthy. Get sick or have a handicapped child? Move to the state with generous welfare benefits Authority and responsibility get separated.
Once government gets into the business of social services, you get this disconnect unless you centralize to the point where this arbitrage becomes difficulty.
Without physical and economic walls, the responsibility for welfare provision will move from Washington to a world authority. We will lose sovereignty. Paper will not stop this. Only recognition of this dynamic and the will to stop it.
There are two extremes in governments: Government by the people, as espoused by Abraham Lincoln, or government by hierarchy.
The former is eternally inviolate. The latter inexorably corruptive.
The US has been run by hierarchies, leadership, since the day it was formed. But the people have been protected from knowing this by barricades of paper, constructed by their masters. Call it seven if you wish, a million will soon burn once lit.
One thing that becomes apparent the more one reads the Founders and their philosophical progenitors in throughout the late enlightenment/early modernity is just how poor they were at reasoning, and how intellectually uncritical they were of their own basic assumptions. Example: Hamilton being incapable of imagining Federal overreach, therefore it will never happen. And that's not the only case.
Granted, they were experimenting, and we have the benefit of hindsight as to how that experiment bore out, but some of the assumptions are just brain-dead silly when you read them. Its a wonder the system has lasted as long as it has!
I would argue that there is an additional wall constructed not by the founders, but in the next generation by Martin van Buren in is capacity as Andrew Jackson's fixer. Specifically, the two party system. While this wall is now also being breached, it held on longer then some of the others.
Sadly, the other wall he constructed, the so called "spoils system", i.e., ensuring all civilian executive branch employees were indeed answerable to the president, was torn down in the late 1800s by people who didn't appear to appreciate its purpose.
When do you guys all "Flee! Flee for your lives!" ?
Clearly this legal stuff is a total basket-case and lost cause; almost deterministically so.
Also, speaking of total basket-cases:
https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/saudi-arabia-signals-its-not-wedded-to-us-dollar-for-trade
....you might end up vindicated far earlier on in the year than expected!
An underlying historical force moves governments to ever greater centralization. The trend is such that we will look wistfully back to the New Deal era as a model of self-government.
That force is transportation.
The very idea that most governance could be done at the state level relied in part in the high cost of changing states. With ease of transport people can arbitrage away the costs and benefits of government services. Work in a low tax state while young and healthy. Get sick or have a handicapped child? Move to the state with generous welfare benefits Authority and responsibility get separated.
Once government gets into the business of social services, you get this disconnect unless you centralize to the point where this arbitrage becomes difficulty.
Without physical and economic walls, the responsibility for welfare provision will move from Washington to a world authority. We will lose sovereignty. Paper will not stop this. Only recognition of this dynamic and the will to stop it.
There are two extremes in governments: Government by the people, as espoused by Abraham Lincoln, or government by hierarchy.
The former is eternally inviolate. The latter inexorably corruptive.
The US has been run by hierarchies, leadership, since the day it was formed. But the people have been protected from knowing this by barricades of paper, constructed by their masters. Call it seven if you wish, a million will soon burn once lit.
How could this go wrong?
One thing that becomes apparent the more one reads the Founders and their philosophical progenitors in throughout the late enlightenment/early modernity is just how poor they were at reasoning, and how intellectually uncritical they were of their own basic assumptions. Example: Hamilton being incapable of imagining Federal overreach, therefore it will never happen. And that's not the only case.
Granted, they were experimenting, and we have the benefit of hindsight as to how that experiment bore out, but some of the assumptions are just brain-dead silly when you read them. Its a wonder the system has lasted as long as it has!
I would argue that there is an additional wall constructed not by the founders, but in the next generation by Martin van Buren in is capacity as Andrew Jackson's fixer. Specifically, the two party system. While this wall is now also being breached, it held on longer then some of the others.
Sadly, the other wall he constructed, the so called "spoils system", i.e., ensuring all civilian executive branch employees were indeed answerable to the president, was torn down in the late 1800s by people who didn't appear to appreciate its purpose.
And yet we do it here on some sixty villages.
>Why was the issue of enumerated powers so important to the Framers? Because there were several states, and Americans could move between them. <...>
Do you have sources to support the idea that the Framers had that in mind?