Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by shadowgovt 1777 days ago
It's worth noting that the original plan was for even less Federal power, and that one fell apart almost immediately.

Power has been moving in a central direction ever since.

1 comments

Not so much "fell apart" as "intentionally overthrown by capitalists when they didn't agree with policies determined through democracy". Madison and his co-conspirators didn't approve of the deliberate currency depreciation and other measures voted in by farmers who fought, unpaid, for years in a war that benefited rich elites and came home to find their farms repossessed by debtors and tax collectors. So long as the various states operated as competing democracies, they were subject to the wishes of their citizens. The constitution, written in secret by a cabal of rich white men, put an end to all of that, as it was intended to do.
So long as the various states operated as competing democracies, they couldn't pull together into one country.
Yeah, that was the original idea. United States would menace the rest of the world a lot less if it weren't truly united.
Alternate history speculation is a fool's game, but a fun one. ;) It's also extremely likely that the (states that make up the) United States would be the territory of other powers if it hadn't united.

It's interesting to speculate on how much of the colonies Britain would have won back in the War of 1812 if it hadn't faced a unified front, or what a powerful France would have done in world history if it had never made the Louisiana purchase sale to the United States because there would have been no United States to make the sale to (or, for that matter, what a powerful Spain would have done if France had made the sale to Spain instead, expanding the Mexican holdings). Or how long slavery would have lasted in North America if there had been no pressure of maintaining a national-scale rule of law to bring disagreements between Northern and Southern states to the point of a military conflict.