TPS Bond ..Send Prop.1 back to the drawing board

[custosnox]

That's a good point, except that the founding fathers themselves tended not to follow their own advice. John Adams' Sedition Act centralized a lot of government power, and Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase sure as hell did the same thing.

I think the founding fathers liked the *idea* of decentralized power, but ultimately were pragmatic depending on the situation. I admit that if I were Jefferson and saw a huge chunk of undeveloped land for sale at a bargain-basement price, I'd sure as hell not be a purist about decentralized powers and turn the purchase down.

Also, the founding fathers were dealing with a nation that was just 13 colonies. I'm fairly certain they wouldn't be purists about decentralized power when it came to highways, water systems, power grid, etc., for a population of 300 million people.

And the argument about decentralized powers dissipates when you're talking about constitutional rights. The "state's rights" argument tended to be used a lot more, but turned into a joke over the obvious unfairness of slavery, racial discrimination, etc. You don't want power decentralized to a point where each state become its own fiefdom. We are the *United* States, after all. There has to be a point where each state, however sloppily, is lurching in the same direction.

It's a tricky balance, but I think we've done pretty well with that so far.

I am not sure the founding fathers were really against a centeralized government.  Jefferson perhaps, but others, such as Adams, seem more for the idea of a strong, central government.  I think they all understood that it ws needed to hold us together as a nation.  The problem they had though was that there were 13 states to convince to join together under this government that had a soveriegn power that none of which really wanted to give up.  So they had to create a central government that did not threaten the individual states ability to govern on a local level.  Of course they also also said (I think it was madison in the federalist paper #10) that the federal governement should have less employees then a staate government, so we can see what happened with that.

[YoungTulsan]

With regards to founders who made power centralizing moves:  I think anyone who attains a position of power is going to test the limits, which is precisely why we need to have those limits on the government.  The founders didn't all believe the same things, but they came to an agreement on what limitations would best keep the federal government from turning into a monster, or what they had just revolted from in Britain.

Infrastructure I agree on.  It is a legit role of the federal government to help the states collectively have a larger economic output through the most efficient exchange of goods and services.  It benefits us all.  Fund infrastructure through use and consumption taxes, so we can drop the whole donor state/leech state argument.

With things like slavery, it is truly sad that it wasn't explicitly abolished in the founding of the nation, but the constitution can be amended, there is a process for it.  Any issue of basic human rights should be amended to the constitution so that they supersede the right of States to become "fiefdoms".

Now I've derailed the thread I see.   I was mainly just trying to poke at the "no to everything" conservatives who would blindly reject a local school district proposal as if its passing would be the same as an expanding federal government which currently has their attention.