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Whether the Constitution failed or not, the article below makes a valid point concerning our current conditions. Our founding fathers warned us about the circumvention of the Constitution and the necessity to have a moral people in order to keep our Republic. Unfortunately, those warnings become the very foundation on the destruction of our Liberty by the people who now represent our “government”. Here is one set of warnings from Thomas Jefferson’s newspaper in 1792: Rules for Changing a Limited Republican Government into an Unlimited Hereditary One.
Did the Constitution fail? Of course. It is a contract between the People and a limited federal government: “We the People” are the first three words. The government broke the contract which nullifies the entire document. Once the people allowed the first breach (arguably Marbury v. Madison in 1803), the end result became inevitable.
Did the Constitution fail? I would submit that the cause of the failure of the Constitution is not the framework but the people. Once the people gave up their natural rights to a federal government, the contract became nothing more than a mandate to enslave us. And there is no other word than slavery to describe the state of anyone who is paying taxes to support a majority of the “people” through entitlements and government workfare.
So how do we regain our Liberty? I once heard an attorney who argued in the U.S. Supreme Court give us one answer. Take the Constitution as written and throw it out the window. Take a blank piece of paper, write down the Constitution as originally written and add the following: THIS TIME WE MEAN IT.
David DeGerolamo
The Constitution Failed
By Ryan McMaken
If you’re still wondering if the US Constitution of 1787 failed to protect liberty, then just look around you. That scrap of parchment is an obvious failure. The US government is the hugest government in the world and meddles in the lives of its citizens (and people worldwide) in every way imaginable. The government accepts no limits on its power whatsoever. The president rules by decree.
This isn’t done under some new constitution. This is all done under the 1787 one. Lots of liberty activists argue that the Supreme Court is just reading the document incorrectly, but one simply cannot deny that virtually everyone in government, as well as most of the general population, is perfectly fine with most of what government does today, and thinks it’s constitutional. If one can plausibly claim that the constitution authorizes most of what the US government does today, then the document’s language is obviously feeble, ineffective, and useless for the purposes of preserving liberty.
Even among those “constitutionalist” types, many of whom are militarists, you’ll find plenty of support for unconstitutional measures such as a standing army, drug prohibition, and other government programs beloved by conservatives, but which are obviously not authorized by the enumerated powers of the constitution.
Rothbard had this figured out a long time ago:
From any libertarian, or even conservative, point of view, it has failed and failed abysmally; for let us never forget that every one of the despotic incursions on man’s rights in this century, before, during and after the New Deal, have received the official stamp of Constitutional blessing.
