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A significant part of the Constitution still dates from the Founders (e.g., the Bill of Rights, the President as Commander in Chief, etc) even if a lot of it does not (e.g. the 14th Amendment, Income Tax, direct election of Senators, etc). Because of this, the reasons they made a certain function of government the way it is is at least a valuable perspective in how it should be used (for example the justification of the commerce clause probably should apply to railroads but probably shouldn't apply to illegal substances).
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May 18, 2014 02:27
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:44 |
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Limerick posted:Another angle I haven't seen mentioned here is that the "Founders" weren't in a consensus on how to run things. There were actually some pretty major ideological differences between them. It's part of why the American governmental system is built around compromise. Federalists vs Republicans was a big deal from the start. What founding father Thomas Jefferson wanted was very different from what founding father Alexander Hamilton wanted, and I think that makes any argument based on "what the founding fathers wanted" a little odd. Yeah but you can argue "The commerce clause was put in by the guys that wanted the strong federal government therefore we should interpret it with a strong federal government in mind".
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May 18, 2014 20:39
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Adam Smith never set foot in the US (either pre or post revolution) so that's a much more relevant statement on British civil government.
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May 18, 2014 20:44
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enraged_camel posted:If you look around the USA today, you will note that it is at least as relevant here and now as it was in mid-18th century Britain. The discussion was specifically about the US in the mid 18th Century though.
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May 18, 2014 21:02
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DynamicSloth posted:The Founding Fathers had some remarkable achievements but they were also the geniuses behind the unworkable Articles of Confederation and an electoral system that was guaranteed to result in a government crashing tie every time there was a competitive election. For a bunch of colonial backwater rubes who spent their whole lives making GBS threads in buckets they were pretty clever but its absurd to think they had a workable plan for the next 20 years much less then next 250. Though the Articles were literally written when they were rebels on the run so it wasn't the best circumstances for drafting.
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May 20, 2014 21:39
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on the left posted:Stalin and Mao killed way more integrated members of society who posed no threat, but the industrial precision used by the Germans to exterminate has never been equalled. Also Mao's actions (specifically the Great Leap Forward because that's where the "30 million dead" number comes from) could be accurately portrayed as a black comedy rather than targeted killings. The equivalent scenario in the US would be basically the Brawndo from Idiocracy.
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May 22, 2014 15:04
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:44 |
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Ethan_Alan posted:What with all the comparisons of Ben Franklin being Goebbels or whatever, I'm curious how other world leaders fare? Like Do they gloss over how big of an rear end in a top hat Churchill was to Africans? And I remember reading somewhere about how Japan finally recognized the rape of Nanjing, but how do they deal with the atrocities they've committed? Is it comparable to how we educate people about our own atrocities? I know for Mao the message the CCP allows is that while he was a great leader/general and had the right ideas, he was pretty bad at actually running the country and caused a fair amount of misery (actually criticizing the current CCP is still a big no-no though).
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May 24, 2014 00:27
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