Suicide or Destiny?
8th July 2018
The Framers’ held a misplaced faith in the Constitution’s checks and balances (see Madison’s Federalist No. 51 and Hamilton’s Federalist No. 81). The Constitution’s wonderful design — containment of a strictly limited central government through horizontal and vertical separation of powers — worked rather well until the Progressive Era. The design then cracked under the strain of greed and the will to power, as the central government began to impose national economic regulation at the behest of muckrakers and do-gooders. The design then broke during the New Deal, which opened the floodgates to violations of constitutional restraint (e.g., Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, the vast expansion of economic regulation, and the destruction of civilizing social norms), as the Supreme Court has enabled the national government to impose its will in matters far beyond its constitutional remit.
In sum, the “poison pill” baked into the nation at the time of the Founding is human nature, against which no libertarian constitution is proof unless it is enforced resolutely by a benign power.
I would put the inflection point earlier, at the Civil War. The whole question of slavery tends to distract from the equally serious question of federalism, which was every bit as important as slavery in the origin of the Civil War but which has been buried under layers of puritan moralism on the part of teachers of history since that day. The Civil War changed the United States from a federal union of states with real power to a unitary state in which the ‘states’ were merely provinces, a process that has been ongoing from that day to this. Proglodytes have been working on having everything run from Washington since Teddy Roosevelt’s day, and the increasing globalization of the economy has allowed them to leverage the Commerce Clause of the Constitution into the chains of Federal regulation under which we suffer in our daily lives.