LMAO. Madison took better notes, so we are obligated to live life his way.

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You are ignorant of everything between now and then. thus, you have this laughable notion that the solution to our current problems can be deduced from some constitutional convention.


not excessively.
I could completely care less about the ideas of a man who called democracy a disease.
the problem is, the powers given to it are vague as all hell. Regulate commerce????? geee, we can run completely wild with that one.

3 sentences from 1787 can hardly be the sole source of authority to administrate a modern capitalist leviathan.

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Not if they were prepared to receive it by the first letter.

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Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Guess who?

If that's true, it wasn't a very strong majority. And I would tend to doubt it, because the framers were disproportionately wealthy men, who as wealthy men tend to do, wanted strong government to protect their property. That's especially true of those whose wealth came from commerce rather than agriculture.

All you have to do is look at the outcome in the actual document to see the compromises that were made, and that Madison's views, although they were certainly represented and influential, did not completely prevail. (Neither did Hamilton's, of course. It was a compromise.) Otherwise, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Many of those men, certainly including both Madison and Hamilton, were highly intelligent and articulate. I'm a very good writer myself, but still I'm confident that if composing the language, "The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts of the United States, and to defray the expense of implementing the powers enumerated in this constitution," is not beyond me, then something to that effect would not be beyond their powers, either. Clearly, based on the evidence of his presidency, such language would have been more to the liking of Mr. Madison than the language which actually exists.

Why, then, isn't it in there? Because Madison's views did not completely prevail, obviously. It was necessary to compromise with the other side, represented by Hamilton and also by Washington, who presided over the whole operation. Actually, a lot of the "working guts" of the Constitution takes its design from John Adams, another Federalist, in his design of the Massachusetts constitution: the bicameral legislature, the distinct executive with a partial veto, and the distinct judicial branch derive from him.

James Madison - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Take a look at Madison's career in the House of Representatives, before he became president.

The change in Madison's views during his presidency is noteworthy. But the main thing I wanted to point out is that his earlier, weak-government views did not universally prevail. In fact, until the election of 1800, they generally lost. There is no reason at all to think the Federalist views were not represented at the Constitution convention -- in fact, we KNOW they were.

As for Madison's notes providing our main record of what went on, that shows nothing except that he was an effective note-taker.

WHy not just move on? You arent interested in discussing this seriously.

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"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his father has acquired too much, in order to spare to others who (or whose fathers) have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, "to guarantee to everyone a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

-Thomas Jefferson

Allright, try to stay with me.

If a person opens their letter, instead of throwing it away as junk mail, wouldn't they also open their check?

If a person is liekly to throw away a check from the government, then they are also likely to throw away the letter which informs them a check is coming.

Well, his penmenship was better also. Even more importantly, MADISON'S wife was hotter than any of the other founding fathers.

So, it doesn't show that he was intelligent, by taking good notes to be used by him later on and by the people as a historical record. If we didn't have his notes, we would know little about who said what during the convention.

I truly wish we could bring Hamilton and Washington back from the grave to ask them some questions. Like, how they feel about needing a permit to build a tool shed in their back yard. About how it is illegal to grow hemp. About how you need a permit to have a few chickens. About how federal tax dollars have been given to study prostitutes in China, goth culture in rural America and African squirrels. About a 21 drinking age, about farmers being paid to NOT GROW crops, about not being able to hunt on your own land without a license and during hunting season.

I could go on, but people like you will never get it. The Federal government is out of control. Spending is out of control and as long as we allow the Federal government to spend money on anything it wishes, we are going to continue to waste many billions of dollars year, after year, after year, through waste, fraud and mismanagement. All because some people think General Welfare means allowing US tax dollars to be embezzled by scumbag dictators in shit hole countries, while their people suffer. Remember Ferdinand Marcos and his wife's trillion pairs of shoes? Our puppet, run out of the Phillipines by his people, but allowed to hide in the US with his loot he stole from his own people and the American people. Sickening.

We helped Suharto kill 100,000-200,000 people in East Timor, all because of two words in the constitution misinterpreted by people like you.

You should feel proud.

It doesn't show that he wrote the Constitution all on his lonesome and should be taken as absolute authority on its intepretation. Who suggested he wasn't intelligent?

Regardless of how you feel about certain cherry-picked things the federal government is doing (I could provide my own list, too), returning to the weak central government that sort of worked in pre-industrial days and that ultimately led to the Civil War and 600,000 casualties is not a solution. It's neither desirable nor possible.

So, the cause of the Civil War was a weak central government?

Wow.

I have enjoyed the discussion, but we will simply never agree. I think people should be able to keep their own money and not have the US government piss it away, where you on the other hand support the waste of billions and billions of dollars every year in support of the "General Welfare."

In January 2007, the Federal Government, excluding the Postal Service employed about 1.8 million civilian workers. The Federal Government is the Nation’s single largest employer. Because data on employment in certain agencies cannot be released to the public for national security reasons, this total does not include employment for the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

Federal Government, Excluding the Postal Service

So, we have over 2 million people working for the Federal government. Over 1% of the working population works for Uncle Sam, NOT COUNTING THE POST OFFICE AND MILITARY/CIA.

Sickening.

WikiAnswers - What percentage of americans are government employed

If you include the Post Office and the Military, the total is closer to 3.5 million people. If you include all government workers, including state and local governments, then you get 11.8 million people. This is 7.8% of all jobs in the US are government jobs.

That is INSANE.

Yes. Of course it was also regional differences, slavery, conflicts over industrialization and between planters and capitalists, yada yada, but none of this would have led to civil war without a central government too weak to prevent it. A system in which each state considered itself independent and sovereign and believed the federal union existed on its suffrance was a civil war awaiting a cause.

This points out a fascinating difference in perspective. A "system in which each state considered itself independent and sovereign" was the intent. It was the federal government's refusal to accept the secession of the southern states that caused the war.

Modern authoritarianism is largely a denial of the core values embodied in the constitution. Rather that resorting to convoluted semantics, perhaps it would be better, and certainly more honest, to just scrap the constitution and its troublesome concepts of sovereignty in favor of a strong unitary nation-state.

[QUOTE=Norrin Radd;1479003]So, the cause of the Civil War was a weak central government?

Wow.
do you consider Social security government waste?
not really. imagine how deeper this economic crisis would be without those jobs. a government that wants to keep order and justice accross an entire continent is going to get a little large.

not really. because you are including the largest standing military in the world in that assessment. imperialism is a unique phenomenon, but it is currently required to maintain our economy as long as possible.

you are just another delusioned 'wants its all' small government advocate.

you are religious about small government, yet you cannot even begin to tell us how it would work in face of modern circumstances.

you will probably tell us how great things were back in 1790.

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It was NOT the intent to create a system that could be dissolved at the whim of individual states. If it WAS the intent to create a system in which each state considered itself independent and sovereign, that was because it was not understood or accepted that the one followed from the other. The Federalist Papers, particularly no. 10, clearly articulated the necessity of preserving the union of states, and raised a specter of constant war, standing armies, and loss of liberty as a result.

I could take issue with your last sentence, in that the first shot was fired by the Confederacy and arose from the claim of South Carolina to what was clearly federal property, without even offering any compensation for it. But even if we say that the federal government caused the war by refusing to accept the secession, the alternative was for it to cause the dissolution of the union, with all the dire consequences predicted. And the bottom line is that the weak federal government that had worked up to that time was no longer working -- it was no longer able to keep the country united.

I simply don't agree with this interpretation. I've been pointing out all along that the influence of Federalists like Hamilton and Washington was just as strong in crafting the Constitution as that of Democratic-Republicans like Madison. The broad empowering language in the Constitution was not put there by error. It was the INTENT to create a document that allowed federal powers that could be expanded to meet unforeseen needs. The only other way to do the deed would have been to make the authorization of powers very strict, precise, and limited, but provide an easy way to amend the document. A constitution with narrow instead of broad empowering language AND a difficult means of amendment is one that quickly becomes obsolete. Ours would have been scrapped by the 1860s.

This Republic will succeed or fail on the interpretation of the enumerated powers. Right now we are failing. I have no idea what comes next, but if we fail, it will be a society governed by an authority elected, empowered, and defined by the needy. Shortly this society will fall to a stronger willed country, and be enslaved. This will be the end of the American experiment.

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"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." - Margaret Thatcher