We Blew It

It's my own design
It's my own remorse
--Tears for Fears

Many people are coming to the conclusion that the Constitution is dead--that its limited government design has been overthrown by those seeking to employ the stong-arm of the State to pursue their interests at the expense of others.

While it has taken centuries to build the current degree of collective awareness that the design is not working, it appears that many of the founders sensed pretty quickly that things would not work out as intended.

In a 1824 letter, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the bicameral legislature had become "representatives of property rather than persons," meaning that Congress had assumed the unintended power to forcibly take property and redistribute it. He lamented that the original design did not go far enough to "break up all cabals"--those factions that naturally form when government favor is for sale.

George Washington expressed similar concern in his 1796 Farewell Address. He observed that the federal government was subject to the organization of "factions" (a term previously employed by James Madison in the Constitution's formative years). Such factions were "likely to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to usurp for themselves the reigns of government."

Many founders wondered how corruption could be avoided even prior to the development of the Constitution. In a letter to a friend in 1781, Sam Adams wrote, "Is there not Reason to think that even those who are opposed to our Cause may steal into Places of the highest Trust? I need not remind you that Men of this Character have had Seats in Congress from the beginning."

While the central government framework was still being hammered out in 1787, Benjamin Franklin said to the Constitutional Convention:

"I believe, farther, that this [Constitution] is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the peope shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other."

It appears that many of our ancestors who put together the original federal design sensed it flawed from the start. Within 50 years those flaws were already visible to the likes of Jefferson and Washington.

Stated differently, the best of the founding group were getting the feeling that they had blown it.

Subsequently, over the course of 200+ years, the structure succumbed to those flaws. And freedom collapsed.