The day we pay our respects and celebrate a document we’ve never really taken that seriously. It was a radical document when the founders wrote it. Reconstruction era Republicans made it even more radical — so radical our ruling elite starting ignoring the parts of it that didn’t suit them. The progressives hijacked it for a time, and later decided they didn’t need to bother with it anymore.
Perhaps a better way to celebrate this radical document would be actually trying to follow it for once.
Now that’s just crazy talk right there. If we did that, people would drink sodas that are larger than 16 oz and who know what else!!!
How is our
glorious ownerbenevolent government supposed to protect us from our own inability to make good decisions if it were to actually follow such a restrictive document?Think of the children!!!11!!1!!!!1!1eleventy-one!11!!
I think if you slog through the 7,000 or so pages that have been collected and recognized as the “Anti-Federalist Papers,” you’ll find that what is being decried here, was largely predicted by the Anti-Federalists in 17871 and 1788. The Federalists just had the advantage of media bias on their side at the time, so succeeded with achieving ratification. If any of the Anti-Federalists could have lived long enough, they would not have been surprised at all by the to-be-expected evolution.
Many of the Federalists I think would have been disappointed at the result as well, because in the end it was the Hamiltonians that won. Though Hamilton was a federalist, he was widely disliked and distrusted, even by the people on his side.
The core of the issue is power, and it’s corrupting influence.
Thus, the sorts of men who seek power on their own are most often those who are most easily corrupted by it.
The real problem with our system is that it doesn’t do enough to limit the ability of any such morally corrupt individual to effectively spend his entire adult life entrenched in a government position whether elected or appointed.
If nobody could serve more than two terms in any given elected position, I would think it would do quite a bit to eliminate the entrenched political class, and I can’t see that being a bad thing.