Should We Really Hate the Yankees?

No. Not close. A law which is disliked by barely over 5% of the citizens (a majority of the population in the 20 smallest-population states) can, in theory, be defeated— as long as it’s the specially-privileged members of the “right” 5%.

I don’t blame them for being afraid of mass stupidity; it’s a human inevitability. But nonetheless, if they wanted to take control away from the people, they should have crafted a dictatorship. No one can explain why centralized power is a bad thing. You can’t just decide that one thing is a virtue and one thing is a sin. You have to provide a warrant for that claim.

I’m paraphrasing a character from a Robert Heinlein novel

Heinlein was a mysognist. Vonnegut and PKD saved science fiction (and then the next generation of Heinleins ruined it again.)

If a law is disliked by as many as two-fifths of all Americans is it not likely that all of us Americans would be better off without it?

First of all, Paul makes an excellent point below about what representation in the Senate actually means, since it isn’t proportional. Second, the answer to the question is a resounding NO. If two-fifths of all Americans don’t like a Presidential candidate, it doesn’t mean that we would all be better off without it. It doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t be better off, either. It doesn’t mean ANYTHING except that 60% voted for him and 40% didn’t. The voice of the people, whether in the form of a 60% majority or a 40% minority, is not an accurate judgment of the rightness of anything; it’s an accurate judgment of popularity.

Let the individual states pass more laws.

This is proven to drive up costs and decrease enforcement. Economies of scale begin to work against the market—and of course, the penalties are passed on to the customer, while any incremental savings never are, because that isn’t what the market does. Meanwhile, without a centralized government to enforce things like environmental regulation, enforcement is meaningless and patchwork.

In today’s universalized society, patchwork hodgepodge governance just isn’t feasible anymore.

If these laws really are such great ideas, they will catch on and eventually spread across the states, each state giving its own appropriate and measured flavor to what the constituency wants.

List of great ideas that did not catch on like that and/or would never have caught on like that: joining World War II. Ending slavery. Desegregation. The Equal Rights Amendment. Social Security. Medicare. Medicaid. The Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Interstate highway system. Amtrak. The Federal Aviation Administration. The Environmental Protection Agency. The Department of Education. The National Labor Relations Board…do I need to go on?

List of great ideas that were destroyed by centralized government: uhm…

but by sending many issues previously dominated by the states to the central government, the Constitution effectively slowed change in those areas.

On debt, from #15:

Is public credit an indispensable resource in time of public danger? We seem to have abandoned its cause as desperate and irretrievable. Is commerce of importance to national wealth? Ours is at the lowest point of declension. Is respectability in the eyes of foreign powers a safeguard against foreign encroachments? The imbecility of our government even forbids them to treat with us. Our ambassadors abroad are the mere pageants of mimic sovereignty. Is a violent and unnatural decrease in the value of land a symptom of national distress? The price of improved land in most parts of the country is much lower than can be accounted for by the quantity of waste land at market, and can only be fully explained by that want of private and public confidence, which are so alarmingly prevalent among all ranks, and which have a direct tendency to depreciate property of every kind. Is private credit the friend and patron of industry? That most useful kind which relates to borrowing and lending is reduced within the narrowest limits, and this still more from an opinion of insecurity than from the scarcity of money.

On the role of the Senate, from #62:

Another advantage accruing from this ingredient in the constitution of the Senate is, the additional impediment it must prove against improper acts of legislation. No law or resolution can now be passed without the concurrence, first, of a majority of the people, and then, of a majority of the States. It must be acknowledged that this complicated check on legislation may in some instances be injurious as well as beneficial; and that the peculiar defense which it involves in favor of the smaller States, would be more rational, if any interests common to them, and distinct from those of the other States, would otherwise be exposed to peculiar danger. But as the larger States will always be able, by their power over the supplies, to defeat unreasonable exertions of this prerogative of the lesser States, and as the faculty and excess of law-making seem to be the diseases to which our governments are most liable, it is not impossible that this part of the Constitution may be more convenient in practice than it appears to many in contemplation.

Emphasis added, natch.

It’s the part of Article III which wasn’t actually part of Article III.

the use of the term by Guido Calabresi and the Federalist Society is the “original original” use of the term, before it was stolen by the pro-Constitution types.

I have no problem with their use of the term, any more than I fault a devotee of Alfred Marshall for calling himself a liberal.

I’m telling you, that’s the solution. Some people might not like Antonin Scalia or Sonia Sotomayor, but I don’t hear too many people concerned that either one has been bought.

at which laborers stopped dying at such ridiculous rates that the expense of bringing them to America was worth paying in order to secure them for life instead of a seven-year indenture.

In early Virginia, especially, the death rate was so astounding that it made no sense to pay to transport a slave over to America, when only a small percentage of indentured servants ever outlived their indenture anyway.

It should be further added that indentured servants absolutely did require both force and occasional manhunts to recapture them in order for plantation owners to fully exploit them. I suppose there was more of a deterrent to escapes because the servant’s indenture would be punitively lengthened if he was caught, but plenty of them still tried it.