"N2EY" wrote in message
...
In article . net,
"Dan/W4NTI"
w4nti@get rid of this mindspring.com writes:

In the beginning........there was Philadelphia.

It's still here.

It was decided to have a loooooose confederation of states brought
together
under a weak Federal government. The purpose of which was to provide
such
things as; common roads, common monies, common rules and regulations
pertaining to INTERSTATE commerce. And if needed to provide for the
defense
of one, or all of the states.

Yep - Articles of Confederation.

What the hell happened?

Simple - the founders discovered that the Articles simply didn't work.
Without
a strong central (federal) government, there was no way to force any of
the
states to work for the common good if they didn't want to.

Common roads, common monies, common rules and regulations
pertaining to interstate commerce and defense of one, or all of the states
all
require a certain amount of central authority and funding. If New York's
legislature decided they didn't want to honor money from South Carolina at
face
value, who was there to make them? Or if a ship from Maryland didn't want
to
take orders from an admiral from Maine, what authority was there to
require
them to do so?

And when it came to taxes.....

End result was another convention here in Philadelphia in 1787, when the
Constitution was written and ratified by representatives from all of the
states. Three did not sign - they refused to do so because there was no
Bill of
Rights in the original Constitution. That was rectified by the first ten
amendments.

You may not like everyhting the Feds do - I know I sure don't! - but the
founders tried the loose confederation idea and it didn't work.

And when it was tried again (1861-1865, 11 states) it ran into the same
problems all over again.

In some ways the Feds have been moving towards a weaker central
government, by
cutting domestic spending - and letting the states take up the slack. Of
course
the Feds don't give up regulatory control, just funding....

What functions would you have the Feds turn over to the states?

73 de Jim, N2EY

There has always been quite a debate over what the federal government should
do versus what the state should do versus what should be left up to
individuals. This is due to the fact that the Constitution has words in it
to the effect that what is not explicitly allocated to the federal
government is reserved to the states and what is not allocated to the states
is reserved to the people. So there has always been a tug of war between
those who want to see the federal government run more and those who think
they should run less. Those who want the federal government to do
everything are relying on the preamble's words about providing for the
common good and interpreting that to mean carte blanche overlooking the fact
that it is just a preamble and that the federal government's actual
responsibilities, structure, etc is spelled out the clauses of the body of
the Constitution, including the amendments.

Dee D. Flint, N8UZE