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Where’d We Go Wrong?
What policy mistake most contributed to our current situation in the United States? I think it’s fair to say we’ve diverged widely from what the Founders had in mind for us when they declared independence from King George III. To keep things reasonable, let’s limit this to changes since the Declaration of Independence. So you can point to the Constitution but not to Christianity, as Christianity predates the Declaration.
One might point to direct elections of senators, for instance, or Prohibition. (One could make an argument for both, but I won’t.) Perhaps our biggest mistake was abandoning the Articles of Confederation? Or not taking the Anti-Federalists’ arguments more seriously?
Ideally we’re talking about root causes, not symptoms. But I don’t think we should limit it to root causes that can be fixed, since that would preclude, for instance, an observation that basing a Constitution on a virtuous citizenry may have been unrealistic. If people aren’t fundamentally virtuous, I don’t think that can be fixed, but it still could have been a mistake.
What say you?
Published in Domestic Policy
Don’t forget the Louisiana Purchase, which motivated Jefferson to back off of his Republican principles for limiting the scope of government, and the internal improvements debate. The first federally-funded interstate highway was started in 1811. This was a camel’s nose under the tent; the old Republicans did not think these things were constitutional.
BINGO. Too few care about such stuff or even know it is stuff that is “care-worthy.” It is why those few who do care have no home in either of “the two” political parties. And too many have been “trained” not to trust “we the people” in making individual decisions of the kind focused on by the advocates of the Libertarian Party alternative. Oh well: there’s always the Ricochet wagon circle.
I’m inclined to say all of the above, and I’ll add one thing: Leaving the gold standard in 1970.
That decision has hobbled the economy and tilted financial power toward the government.
I will add another one: Outlawing God and prayer from our public schools.
19th century intellectuals going over Europe to get PhD’s and then brought back Europeans ideas to American Universities, like the Prussian model of Schooling and socialism.
Really? What about the political protest movements led by Andrew Jackson, the Boston police strike of 1919, the veterans in the early ’20’s, the labor riots of the first third of the 20th century, shantytowns in Lafayette Park in the ’30’s, the civil rights marches in the ’40’s and ‘5o’s, etc.? This stuff has been with us forever.
Don’t forget Shays rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion. (The fact that the latter is still known by that name is a propaganda victory for Alexander Hamilton, who also wanted to put it down with more brutality than was necessary or actually used.)
Should a muslim teacher lead all of his students in prayer towards Mecca five times a day?
If they’re all Muslim, it won’t hurt anything.
When I went to public schools in North Dakota and Nebraska in the 1950s we never had prayer in school. I did attend a Lutheran school for two years, and there we had prayers, of course. I have been told that the prayer in public school thing was more of an Eastern U.S. phenomenon.
That reminds me, last night in my Mom’s stuff I found a rare photo taken in front of the public school in Nebraska that I attended from grades 3-8.
The smart-aleck kid in front is me, standing next to my grandfather and siblings. That Ford is Miss Schwanebeck’s car; she taught the upper grades. I’m not sure what the occasion was; we lived just a quarter-mile away in the Lutheran parsonage so always walked. I don’t think my parents would have encouraged prayers in public school, but prayers were not part of it anyway. We did have a public school Christmas program with carols, but the music tended more toward the secular than what we had at church.
People later talked against the Supreme Court ruling when it came down, but it didn’t change anything for anybody in our part of the country.
just to clarify, you mean redistribution of citizen’s wealth by the government, right?
The fact that the government CAN redistribute wealth is why there are so many employees, and the incessant meddling in our lives.
Would we could reduce the government’s cash flow, and there would be less meddling, and fewer employees who would want to unite to serve their interests.
Haven’t our executive and legislative branches abrogated their responsibilities to the bureaucracy?
It’s like the President and Congress have appointed hundreds of foreman to run the farm, and they’ve gone mad with what they THINK is their own power.
The bureaucracy is like Hal from 2001??
There is truth to that.
For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.
That the original 13 could not unite on that topic, and convince all to leave space within their merchant selves to acknowledge the humanity, and natural rights of those enslaved from Africa. It speaks to something severely lacking in the world view.
But have things changed? While that specific type of slavery is now outlawed, do we just have different forms and styles of slavery now?
If you’re talking about labor relations, a lot of historians now talk about a continuum of systems rather than the binary slavery vs free. And I think they are right to do so.
But I think the modern comparison to be made is with abortion. It does something similar to the human spirit. You can see it in the belligerence with which it is supported, and the wrath brought down on anyone who opposes it. I would like to believe that a house that is divided on this issue can stand perfectly well, but there are some who seek to prove Mr. Lincoln right, that a house so divided cannot stand.
Because everyone CAN vote, that puts great pressure on the broader society to make an attempt to educate everyone, and leads to the mess we are in, regarding public education, and especially those who REJECT the opportunity to learn and gain wisdom, knowledge, and skill.
Certainly if owning property was the path to gaining a vote, to gaining a say in how the government ran, people might work harder to gain the basic skills to attain that right.
But alas, education is “free.”
Voting wasn’t listed in the Declaration of Independence as one of our natural rights.
interesting turn in the discussion…
Bull$%^&.
yes.
that thinking people believe the lie that government could achieve this is astonishing. Life is harsh, even when it is good.
You can only acquire that kind of insurance policy if you pay, and pay a REAL, and precious tribute. So, we Americans now exchange our birthright of liberty for a hot bowl of soup, and a lifetime of servitude to the ‘insurer’, our not-so-great Uncle Sam.
Nor was it part of the adoption or ratification of the 14th amendment. But those darn penumbras and emanations visible only to SCOTUS members AFTER they don the black robes blind them to what is in plain sight in favor of their take on what “should” be.
I think this is wrongheaded. Nixon needed to do something in 1970.
Nixon could have decided to raise the price of gold at the gold window (which only foreigners could access) rather than close it altogether, but he needed to do something because the market price of gold had gone way out of whack with the Bretton Woods exchange rate system and the Europeans were redeeming their dollars for well below market price gold like crazy. If he had left the gold window open, the US Treasury would have no gold whatsoever.
The US really went off the gold standard when FDR made it illegal for US citizens to hold gold currency.
Marbury v. Madison was reasonable decision, I think. It took me quite a while to come to that conclusion, but I don’t think it was a root cause, as being able to void laws that violate the Constitution is implicit in the judicial power.
One can point to two fundamental problems that made that decision far worse than it would have been otherwise:
Having terms for justices, or forcing them to face re-appointment would help keep them on the reservation.
Impeachment was supposed to be a check on officials violating their oaths of office, but it’s been a total failure, especially for the judiciary.
Yes, Bretton-Wood had its problems (I’d elaborate, but I’d have to dig into my Milton Friedman books again. Please be patient with me.), but look what happened after we ended it.
A better designed gold standard would have been the answer. (Now I’m really in over my head.)
Those would both help rein in out of control justices, and realistically, impeachment will never be used short of someone killing someone in office it seems. Judicial review, though, is not a power granted to the Supreme Court in the Constitution. The constitutionality of laws is first supposed to be taken seriously by the legislature, then by the executive who can veto the law on those grounds. Allowing the Court to seize the power of judicial review has left us where we are today where Congress passes blatantly unconstitutional laws while the executive rubber stamps them while saying it’s up to the Court to determine if it’s constitutional or not. That puts the entire process on its head.
There’s an argument for also allowing the states themselves to have a say in the constitutionality of laws since all powers not delegated to the federal government are to reside with the states as per the 10th amendment. Additionally, the Constitution is a compact among the states ratifying it. By allowing the federal government, and solely the federal government, to determine whether its own acts are constitutional, the game has been rigged to some degree with those who should have an active say having no say at all, especially with the direct election of senators removing states’ direct involvement in the legislature’s composition.
But that’s not what judicial review is. That’s judicial supremacy. Not at all the same thing.
It has resulted in judicial supremacy because it opened the door for the other two branches to shirk their responsibility and leave it entirely at the judiciary’s discretion. Jefferson warned of the dangers of judicial review being accepted: “The Constitution… meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.” Isn’t that our modern criticism of the activist Courts we’ve endured for the better part of 60 years?
Tying back into impeachment, Jefferson used the argument that impeachment being solely a power of the legislature by its nature meant that the legislature was the sole branch with authority to define what is and isn’t constitutional. If they determine that the President or Justice has violated their interpretation of the Constitution, they can proceed to impeach them, and it is then up to the voting population to provide the corrective to the legislature if the populace determines the legislature is interpreting wrongly. This would also have brought the states back into play since they appointed one house of the legislature. That seems to me a better response which keeps the branch most answerable to the people/states in check rather than leaving that power to essentially untouchable oligarchs.
I dunno. The Supreme Court and Presidency would not be so powerful if Congress hadn’t discovered that its job is to hand out goodies, which works fine for Congress as long as it doesn’t get bogged down in other responsibilities that might conflict with it. But if it decides that the Presidency is too powerful and it’s time to cut back on Presidential discretionary funds, then the President is going to make it difficult for troublesome Members of Congress to spend goodies in their districts.
First of all, we seem to concur that judicial review is not the same as judicial supremacy. Good!
Second, you can’t have judicial supremacy without judicial review, so naturally judicial review “opens the door” for judicial supremacy. In the same way electing Rand Paul opens the door for making Paul into a dictator. It satisfies a necessary condition.
But it’s not a sufficient condition–unless there’s reason to believe that a first step in that direction naturally leads all the way.
Third, I see no such reason. Nothing in the doctrine of judicial review, considered by itself, entails judicial supremacy or exclusivity in Constitutional interpretation, or invites other branches to shirk their responsibilities.
Fourth, the contrary is the case: The original doctrine of judicial review was rooted in Constitutional supremacy, and thus implied that the judiciary is subordinate to the Constitution–such that an obvious unConstitutionality in a judicial ruling is legitimate grounds for impreachment, jurisdiction-stripping, executive non-enforcement, and whatever else is part of the range of powers granted to the other branches to check the judiciary.
It is. And that criticism is directed (rightly) against the doctrines of judicial supremacy and judicial exclusivity in Constitutional interpretation. Even Jefferson’s quote appears not to be directed against judicial review as articulated in Marbury, but against those stronger (and aberrant) doctrines. The immediate context shows that he’s talking about judicial supremacy:
This site starts by confusing judicial review for judicial supremacy, but if its quotations from Jefferson are correct then it seems clear he was targeting the latter.
(And even if he himself confused the two doctrines, so long as we agree they are separate, it falls to us to concur with his criticism of judicial supremacy, but it need not so fall to concur with a criticism of judicial review.)