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To: AKbear
Huck, thanks for posting the revelant part of Federalist #41.

No problemo. I would love to see the point debated by competent adversaries. I should say I don't have a dog in this fight, i.e., I don't know for certain what I think the correct answer is. I am slightly biased towards Madison, because I admire what he did. Yet I have a good amount of skepticism about his libertarian inclinations, and his manner of flip-flopping. Take nullification. Madison was both correct and dead wrong on that subject, depending on the year. But it is a key constitutional point. We know which view prevailed. It would still interest me to see it debated here.

36 posted on 10/03/2001 12:43:27 PM PDT by Huck
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To: Huck
Madison, Jay, and especially Hamilton were not true "libertarian" types. Hamilton was a strong advocate for expanded federal powers, and Madison and Jay were to a lesser extent. Madison really wanted a strong central government with protections for individual liberty, but he wasn't adamant about it. I think Jay was the most "libertarian" among the three and held them to keep the intrusions of federal government to a minimum.

The true "libertarian" types were Jefferson and other Anti-Federalists. They thought the Articles of Confederation were sufficient, and if we had to have a constitution it had better have some very, very strong protection for individual liberties. Thus they fought for the Bill of Rights which the Federalists claimed were unnecessary. They said that if the federal government adhered to the constitution, an individual's rights were protected, and a Bill of Rights would be redundant.

That is the primary reason for the Federalist Papers. The Anti-Federalists were writing letters to newspapers saying that the proposed constitution gave the federal government too much power. Madison, Jay, and Hamilton wrote the Federalist Papers to counter those arugments.

Unfortunately, the predictions of the Anti-Federalists turned out to be pretty accurate.

41 posted on 10/03/2001 1:41:31 PM PDT by AKbear
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