Fedralism v. Sovereignity

The following was posted to Baen's Bar by Ed Bartlett. Entries headlined From the Bar© are thoughts that have appeared at Baen's before I post them here; in fact, a majority of my posts start out on the bar.

How many of you have heard of John Hanson? Believe it or not, he was the first American President, almost a decade before George Washington.

So, why haven't we been taught about him in school. Because poor old Hanson had the misfortune of being president under the Articles of Confederation, the first attempt after the Revolution to create a government. It didn't work.

Why,you ask? Therein lies the crux of of this topic, and something I've been thinking about for sometime. I've had the pleasure of participating in many a lively debate here at the Bar, and I have been impressed time and again with the caliber of minds that reside here. This seemed the perfect place to get some other perspectives on the subject.

Anyway, back to the Articles of Confederation. The Articles, as a form of government, didn't even last a decade. There were many problems from the start, some of the largest being the problems they ran into with taxes and tarriffs.

Let's say for example that you are a farmer in Vermont, and your biggest cash crop is maple syrup. You want to sell it down south, knowing that you will be able to charge more in Georgia than you would in Vermont, because they don't make maple syrup in Georgia. So you load up your wagons and start heading south.

And run right into the tarriff problem. As you cross into New York, a border guard stops you and demands that you pay a rather healthy fee for the privledge of using New York's roads on your way to Georgia. The same thing happens at the Pennsylvania border. And Maryland. And Virginia. By time you get to Georgia, you've priced yourself right out of the market.

The military, or lack thereof, was another problem. There was no one militia, there was 13 seperate armies, often working at cross purposes with each other. If the Constitution had not been drafted in 1789 to address these and other problems, America would have been extremely vulnerable when the War of 1812 rolled around. We might have ended up as British colonies again, although England's problems with Napolean at the time makes that unlikely.

So, where am I going with this?

If you were to ask most people what it was they really and truly wanted in this life, I think that most of them would say that all they want is to have the opportunity to live in peace, raise their families, and have the possibility of bettering their situation, all with a minimal amount of hassle from the government. These are the ideas that America was founded on, and in my humble opinion we've done fairly well in maintaining those ideals over the last 200 years. Certainly we've done better than most of the other nations in the world.

The ironic thing is that the Constitution of the United States, which has given us those two centuries of the good life, was bitterly opposed by many of the founding fathers, who feared a repressive central government. Well, that is certainly understandable, especially coming on the heels of the Revolution. Spending the better part of a decade fighting against just such a regime is bound to leave a bitter taste in anyones mouth. There were many people that wanted to keep the government small and local, so as to make sure they would never have to worry about "Big Brother". Hence the Articles of Confederation.

The problem was, and still is for that matter, is that it doesn't work. When I was stationed in Germany in the mid '80s, one of my buddies took a vaction in one of the neighboring European countries. He came back saying what a great time he'd had, how friendly everybody was, how beautiful the towns and countryside were, and how much he wanted to visit the capitol again someday.

What was this place, you ask? Sarajevo, Yugoslavia.

Yes, that Sarajevo. Marshal Tito realized back during WWII that his nation was filled with a lot of cantakerous people that couldn't stand each other, with ethnic and cultural feuds that spanned a thousand years. So he clamped down, hard. But he also created a rule of law that was fairly equitable, at least for a Communist country, and created economic opportunities that made Yugoslavia second only to East Germany in quality goods and service amongst the Warsaw Pact Nations.

Ask anybody in the former nation of Yugoslavia whether they were better off in 1985 or 1995, and see what they say. I'm reasonably sure I can guess their answer.

Hold on, I'm almost there.

Historically speaking, small autonomous nations or tribes don't work, not in the long run. Sure, you get to preserve your "cultural identity", whatever the hell that means, but at what cost? More often than not, you're subject to the petty whims of the local warlord or chief, fighting constantly with the neighboring clans or countries to maintain your position. Ask the individual how much his daily life resembles the ideal I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. Pretty much, it doesn't.

Now, I relaize that bigger is not always better; the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the PRC all leap to mind. And there are tons of other examples of brutal empires from history to point at as well. But it seems to me that if you really and truly want peace, then the only way is to unite everyone under the same banner, much as Tito did.

The UN, I hear someone say? Please, let's be serious. The UN is a noble idea, that was fatally flawed from the start. You can't get 191 nations to agree on anything, and the UN has no power to enforce any of it's resolutions, even if you could get everyone to agree.

And finally, isn't it ironic that the 2 times in history that are generally considered to be the most peaceful, comparitively speaking, were created by stong, centrally governed empires. I refer of course to the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannica.

OK, I'm done.

Ed can be reached on the Bar.

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