[Freedom_Is_Not_Free]

As much as I hate the modern federal power grab — which is less a power grab than a power gift by the idiot voters who keep insisting on giving the FedGov more power — the Articles of Confederation were flat unworkable. The nation could never have remained unified.

I will concede however that we over-corrected.

Even then, the Constitution worked as designed for as long as we were moral and informed. Yes, Lincoln shredded the constitution, but it really took the modern Communist infiltration of American institutions at every level before the Constitution really became neglected. It worked superbly for the first 100 years of our nation’s history.

That’s not a bad start. Almost all Democratic forms of government start to collapse after about 200 years, because it takes that long for a generation to come along that has absolutely no clue about or interest in the reasons for creating the Democracy in the first place. It takes that long to collectively forget the original sacrifices, sufferings, and mindset of the people who created the Democracy, which is a Republic in our case.

[jobim]

I concur with everything you say, except:

the Articles of Confederation were flat unworkable. The nation could never have
remained unified

That Philadelphia Convention never allowed for that possibility, so we do not know how
we might have moved forward. But to simply say, as conventional wisdom dictates, that
doom was inevitable, is making an ill-founded assumption.

The North had not the right to make aggressive war on the South, but the South had the
right to defend itself. (Just War theory). We had no right to take Cuba & the Philippines,
nor Hawaii. We had no right to be in Vietnam nor the Middle East wars.

Were the unanimous vote of all the states necessary to go to war, perhaps only against
Hitler might we have joined the fight.

I work from 2 premises:
1) all gov't (as you said) is eventually corrupted
2) only competition brings the possibility of liberty