14. Elections in the Bicameral Congress
The nationalists who went into the convention agreed on certain broad objectives, crucial for a new government, all designed to remodel the United States into a country with the British political structure. They had the ultimate advantage of any group that knows what it wants in advance of a convention. First, there must be an overriding sovereign government with independent power to tax, regulate, and coerce states and individuals.
15. The Nature of National Power
At the end of May, the convention approved with little debate the severely national power granted to Congress, including the absolute power to act when it deemed the states to be “incompetent” and to veto all state laws it held to violate the constitution or any national treaties (a device added by Benjamin Franklin).
In my previous post we saw some of the areas where Taleb’s writing is strikingly Misesian: the hidden value and emergent properties of spontaneous orders, the insightfully realistic view of uncertainty and risk-taking, and the aggressive despising of econometrics and other unproper uses of math in the domain of economics.
So far the similarities. As for the differences, most of them are quite profound.
Part III: The Nationalists Triumph: The Consitutional Convention
11. Shays’ Rebellion
Massachusetts suffered particularly from the economic aftermath of the Revolutionary War as its fisheries trade was cut off and its exports to the West Indies were sharply curtailed. Furthermore, the grandiose postwar funding of the wartime Massachusetts debt, which ballooned from £100,000 to £1.5 million after the war, placed a particularly heavy tax burden on its citizenry.
12. The Annapolis Convention
By 1787, the nationalist forces were in a far stronger position than during the Revolutionary War to make their dreams of central power come true. Now, in addition to the reactionary ideologues and financial oligarchs, public creditors, and disgruntled ex-army officers, other groups, some recruited by the depression of the mid-1780s, were ready to be mobilized into an ultra-conservative constituency.
13. The Delegates of the Convention and America’s Great Men
From the very beginning of the great emerging struggle over the Constitution the Antifederalist forces suffered from a grave and debilitating problem of leadership. The problem was that the liberal leadership was so conservatized that most of them agreed that centralizing revisions of the Articles were necessary—as can be seen from the impost and congressional regulation of commerce debates during the 1780s.
Part II: The Western Lands and Foreign Policy
7. The Old Northwest
With the cession of the claims of Virginia and other states to the lands of the Old Northwest, and the passage of its Ordinance of 1784 (applying to all western lands), Congress had nationalized the public domain and pledged itself to allow full self-government to any settlers of new territory whenever the territory should amass a population of 20,000 or more.
8. The Old Southwest
In the Southwest the Americans faced an at least equally difficult situation. At the end of the war, about 10,000 American settlers lived in these southwestern enclaves: central Kentucky, what is now northeastern Tennessee on the Holston River, and on the Cumberland River in north-central Tennessee. To the south, Spain claimed all the land south and west of the Tennessee River, covering western Tennessee and what is now Mississippi and Alabama.
