Bacon, Guns & Whiskey

Way back in our first installment, we saw that the Founders were cognizant of man’s lust of power and wealth. The Framers’ mistake was that they assumed a) their posterity would be as honorable and loyal to liberty as they were and b) that the people would be vigilant and not become complacent.

Government is essential to a functional society and, to accomplish it, “the people must cede some of their natural rights … to vest [a government] with requisite powers.” Mary Webster is obviously just translating Federalist #2 into modern language, but I believe what John Jay and the other authors would agree is that our ceding power is more akin to a loan than a surrender. The problem we face today is that we’ve not paid attention to our “principal” and our ruling class has taken our loan and decided that it was a surrendering.

The Framers of the Constitution knew that a single, united America was the way to leverage our shared geography, our shared language, and our shared culture. It’s worth noting that Anti-Federalists would have a field day with that last one: we’re so divided and so culturally different now (mainly because politicians have used our differences to divide us, rather than unify us), our shared geography and language are just about all that unite us these days.

But I digress. We started out with a document from the Constitutional Convention that solved the issues of the Articles of Confederation, and contained — at the time — iron-clad protections against government overreach. Iron-clad at the time. Today, the 17th Amendment has all but nullified the 10th Amendment, and Congress legislates and regulates every single aspect of our lives.

A thoughtful examination of our current condition, compared with that which the Founders gave us in 1787, exemplifies the disparity: the government need only to be loaned certain rights of the people in order to complete its essential functions. Today, we have something more synonymous with a central government than a federal one.