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  • Originally posted by Station 22 View Post
    Our Congress is a drunken teenage off at college.
    Not just drunk....now they are on crack.

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    • Originally posted by Station 22 View Post
      Please look at the chart here titled US Federal government spending and note when the spike in Federal spending occured
      I am amazed the state governments ratified the 17th Amendment. I can only surmise that the poplulist movements in force during the era had a large part to play in the desire to change the election method. It certainly was a component of the further lessening of States' Rights. Note what large block of states has never ratified the amendment.[/quote]

      Only two amendments since the end of the Civil war has been ratified by all states, so it's really not a surprise. After you have 3/4 of the states, it's pro forma at that point.

      Originally posted by Station 22
      You cannot disentangle the 16th and 17th Amendments, where profligate Federal spending is concerned-they go hand in hand. Remove the check on controlling Federal spending by allowing people to vote directly for a House and Senate that can vote one state another state's money, then essentially write a blank check for Congress to spend that money and you will get a spike in Federal spending around 1916-17. Sure, there was a war cranking up for the US at that time, but the postbellum levels of Federal spending never declined appreciably, never getting anywhere near the levels prior to 1915 and then it proceeded to climb steadily thereafter.
      First, they were proposed at different times, so they are not entangled from a legislative perspective.

      However, you are now changing your thesis, which before was that it was the 17th Amendment - now your new thesis is that it was the 16th and 17th Amendment that led to the increase in spending.

      So, while my inquiry is still pretty much the same, I will ask it from a different angle. Please provide evidence that without the direct election of Senators (which had become a defacto reality in the majority of states before the amendment even was proposed), federal spending would not have increased. In other words, in the absence of direct elections for Senators but with a means to implement an income tax, why would Congress not choose to raise additional revenues and then spend them?

      Also, you never answered my question as to why the states chose to place the question of electing Senators directly with the people as opposed to with the state legislature.
      "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

      Comment


      • The corruption of the Senate election process would seem to have started with the corruption of original intent as early as the Jacksonian Era. That intent, contrary to Progressive belief, was that the role of the people would be limited to choosing good legislators at the local level, and trusting the hierarchical system of representation to filter and refine popular sentiments in the appointment of senators. The eventual failure of the original method of elections was as much an indictment of the people themselves as it was of the system. Having proven incompetent in the election of honest legislators, their proposed reform consisted of transferring Senate elections from the "corrupt" few, directly to the incompetent many.

        Georgia did not ratify the amendment btw.

        Comment


        • Originally posted by Julie View Post
          The corruption of the Senate election process would seem to have started with the corruption of original intent as early as the Jacksonian Era. That intent, contrary to Progressive belief, was that the role of the people would be limited to choosing good legislators at the local level, and trusting the hierarchical system of representation to filter and refine popular sentiments in the appointment of senators. The eventual failure of the original method of elections was as much an indictment of the people themselves as it was of the system. Having proven incompetent in the election of honest legislators, their proposed reform consisted of transferring Senate elections from the "corrupt" few, directly to the incompetent many.
          Julie,

          Corrupt state legislatures captured by special interests was one of the reasons from what I've seen for going to direct elections. Thus, spending induced by special interests was already part of the problem and not pursuant to direct elections.

          However, rather than singling out the people in this case, I'd submit that it's the incentives of political office that make suboptimal policy with regards to the use of government revenues endemic to the process.

          Originally posted by Julie
          Georgia did not ratify the amendment btw.
          I guess the Georgia legislature didn't want to lose an additional source of revenue. Maybe that's where Blagojevich learned his tricks from :))
          "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

          Comment


          • Originally posted by Shek View Post
            I am amazed the state governments ratified the 17th Amendment. I can only surmise that the poplulist movements in force during the era had a large part to play in the desire to change the election method. It certainly was a component of the further lessening of States' Rights. Note what large block of states has never ratified the amendment.
            Only two amendments since the end of the Civil war has been ratified by all states, so it's really not a surprise. After you have 3/4 of the states, it's pro forma at that point.
            I didn't mention unanimous ratification, you did. I am simply amazed that it was ratified by the requisite number of states to begin with. Does it matter that several states violated their own laws to ratify it? I guess not.

            First, they were proposed at different times, so they are not entangled from a legislative perspective.
            How does the time of the proposals have anything to do with the resultant affects of their enacting, which was less than 4 months apart.
            However, you are now changing your thesis, which before was that it was the 17th Amendment - now your new thesis is that it was the 16th and 17th Amendment that led to the increase in spending.
            Does it matter? The two go hand in hand, available taxation and lack of State government oversight on the voting habits of the individuals originally tasked by those who authored the original document to protect the the interests of the individual States.
            So, while my inquiry is still pretty much the same, I will ask it from a different angle. Please provide evidence that without the direct election of Senators (which had become a defacto reality in the majority of states before the amendment even was proposed), federal spending would not have increased. In other words, in the absence of direct elections for Senators but with a means to implement an income tax, why would Congress not choose to raise additional revenues and then spend them?
            Prove a negative, in other words? What other governmental changes were enacted in the 5-10 years prior to 1920 that would have a direct effect on changes on how Federal tax dollars are spent? The end of decentralized budget discussion by the Senate? Possibly, but with the ability raise revenue and without State oversight of the Senator's actions, then that would merely be a procedural change.
            Also, you never answered my question as to why the states chose to place the question of electing Senators directly with the people as opposed to with the state legislature.
            I am sure your thoughts on this will differ from mine. It was another of those feel-good, class-envy initiatives proposed by populists. Don't worry about income tax, only the filthy rich will have to pay it. You should be able to choose your own senator and take the power away from the corrupt state legislature.
            Last edited by Station 22; 08 Dec 09,, 04:44.

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            • Originally posted by Shek View Post
              I guess the Georgia legislature didn't want to lose an additional source of revenue. Maybe that's where Blagojevich learned his tricks from :))
              Ha-ha...very funny.

              The framers’ legislative design was subtle, but ingenious: While a Member of the House would represent the interests of the people as citizens, a Senator would represent the very different interests of the people’s sovereign state governments. This structure embodied the original meaning of the term “separation of powers.” The legislature would domicile two distinct powers (the people and the states) to compete bill by bill for the direction and scope of the federal government.

              Representatives to the House, with only two short years to prove their worth to constituents, would demand governmental activity at any cost. Envoys to the Senate, the voices of state legislatures primarily interested in keeping political power closest to where the people live, would limit the federal government’s growth. The framers gave the Senate functions different from that of the House, such as the confirmation of judges and Cabinet appointees, presuming that the emissaries of the states would approve only of those nominees possessing a view of government not precluding the states from first providing for their own citizens’ needs. In this way, the Senate was guarding the constitutional henhouse.

              In 1913, the 17th Amendment and the popular elections of Senators turned the henhouse over to the hound dog. While current representatives to the House and Senate have different (though overlapping) geographic constituencies, they have extraordinarily similar interests: the properly intemperate and unfiltered will of the people, and the special interest groups that fuel campaigns. There is no longer the competition of disparate interests the framers believed was required to keep the federal government responsive, yet moderate in tone and scope.

              The 17th Amendment was proposed and ratified primarily on the strength of these two arguments: 1. The selection of Senators by legislatures was irredeemably corrupt. Some Senators were accused of “buying” their seats from state legislatures, either through cash payments or through loyal service to party machines. 2. “The will of the people” is best expressed through popular elections.

              Consider these arguments in turn.

              First, if the primary purpose of the 17th was to eradicate corruption from Senatorial selection, it failed brilliantly at doing so. Far too many contemporary examples exist to suggest otherwise. Corruption will always be a part of politics and must be dealt with aggressively, but altering the foundational structure of the Constitution in order to wave a hand at corruption was profoundly misguided.

              Second, the purpose of the Constitution is to establish a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but the framers did not intend to make the federal government an instrument of mob rule. The long history of failed civilizations taught them that democracy has practical limits, and those limits include a majority’s tendency to disregard minority views and financial bankruptcy.

              The Senate was designed to serve the people, but not as a democratic body. Some have suggested that this was because the framers — as elitists — distrusted the people. There is little evidence to back this up. The framers each came from states where almost every feature of the state government — from the governor to the local magistrate — was democratically determined, and the framers made the will of the people well-represented in the House. It certainly was not the case that after fighting a war of independence from titled privilege, they wanted to secure a place for an aristocracy they all despised, as is suggested by others.

              The framers made the Senate a non-democratic body because they believed that when democracy’s limits are reached, citizens lose their liberty and governments go broke. (Hellooo, ring a bell?) :))

              As Sen. Zell Miller, Democrat of Georgia, put it, “Direct elections of Senators … allowed Washington’s special interests to call the shots, whether it is filling judicial vacancies, passing laws, or issuing regulations.”

              Comment


              • Originally posted by Julie View Post

                There was a line drawn in that Constitution as to the powers of the Central Government, and it has long been crossed.
                You won't find much disagreement there not here at least. However where the government is today vs the question of secession are two different things. States do not have the right to secede, they do have the power to control federal spending if they would simply exercise it, but too many states are willing to be bought off with other states money. A simple constitutional amendment to limit federal spending to federal revenues would be easy to write, we almost got one in the 70's. However its passing has eleuded us.

                If the Federal Government has all this authority, what is the point in having individual states then?

                Please, someone answer me that.
                Local responsiveness, here in Arkansas we keep our government on a short leash- they meet 1x every 2 years except for special committees, they cannot spend money we do not have, the power to tax primary residences is severely curtailed- I don't pay the government rent (property taxes) for my land thanks to the Homestead Act. Our sales tax is average (6.25%), our car taxes and permit fees are low (my wife's 2005 Vibe cost $29 to tag and the only permit I needed when buildign my house was a perc test), our income tax is low... We don't have a lot of the bells and whistles but looking at our unemployment and tax rate compared to the nations that is not a bad thing. Our blight is the Delta Region but we are even taking steps there having equalized funding for schools and teacher salaries (minimum levels) despite property values

                Comment


                • Originally posted by zraver View Post
                  Local responsiveness, here in Arkansas we keep our government on a short leash- they meet 1x every 2 years except for special committees, they cannot spend money we do not have, the power to tax primary residences is severely curtailed- I don't pay the government rent (property taxes) for my land thanks to the Homestead Act. Our sales tax is average (6.25%), our car taxes and permit fees are low (my wife's 2005 Vibe cost $29 to tag and the only permit I needed when buildign my house was a perc test), our income tax is low... We don't have a lot of the bells and whistles but looking at our unemployment and tax rate compared to the nations that is not a bad thing. Our blight is the Delta Region but we are even taking steps there having equalized funding for schools and teacher salaries (minimum levels) despite property values
                  Sounds like I need to move to Arkansas.:)) No property tax, that is a good thing.

                  Comment


                  • Originally posted by Station 22 View Post
                    Sounds like I need to move to Arkansas.:)) No property tax, that is a good thing.
                    We have property tax, but thanks to Amendment 79 (Homestead Act) the first $300-360 is forgiven on your primary residence. For homes under about 150K this means no property tax.

                    On the issue of the 17th amendment- the system then was not working. Take a gander at the Granger Movement to see just how corrupt it had become. We only think we have issues with special interests now. back then the Senate and the Court were bought and paid for.

                    Comment


                    • Errrrh, Lady and Gentlemen, while I follow the details of your facinating discussion, I'm afraid that I've lost the forest while looking at the trees. If I may ask, what exactly are you disagreeing about?

                      Comment


                      • Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
                        Errrrh, Lady and Gentlemen, while I follow the details of your facinating discussion, I'm afraid that I've lost the forest while looking at the trees. If I may ask, what exactly are you disagreeing about?
                        It's following a rathole down the state's rights argument and the relationship between the state and the federal government. Here's the six degrees of Kevin Bacon path:

                        Civil War - Secession - Constitution - Articles of Confederation - Federalism - 17th Amendment

                        Most of it is unrelated to the question of secession in terms of evidence, although it is marginally topical since it does touch on federalism and the relationship of the states to the federal government.
                        "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

                        Comment


                        • Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
                          Errrrh, Lady and Gentlemen, while I follow the details of your facinating discussion, I'm afraid that I've lost the forest while looking at the trees. If I may ask, what exactly are you disagreeing about?
                          Danged if I know. I guess we started out a page or three ago, deciding that we didn't like each other and set out to prove it.;) I'm not too sure that is working out very well.

                          Comment


                          • Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
                            Errrrh, Lady and Gentlemen, while I follow the details of your facinating discussion, I'm afraid that I've lost the forest while looking at the trees. If I may ask, what exactly are you disagreeing about?
                            My opinion of that, sir, would be discussing how our Federal Government uses our Constitution as a chew toy.

                            Comment


                            • Originally posted by Julie View Post
                              My opinion of that, sir, would be discussing how our Federal Government uses our Constitution as a chew toy.
                              If only the Feds had that much affection for it...
                              Last edited by Station 22; 08 Dec 09,, 20:50.

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                              • Slavery in the North

                                African slavery is so much the outstanding feature of the South, in the unthinking view of it, that people often forget there had been slaves in all the old colonies. Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant's Coffee House of New York. Such Northern heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people. William Henry Seward, Lincoln's anti-slavery Secretary of State during the Civil War, born in 1801, grew up in Orange County, New York, in a slave-owning family and amid neighbors who owned slaves if they could afford them. The family of Abraham Lincoln himself, when it lived in Pennsylvania in colonial times, owned slaves.[1]

                                When the minutemen marched off to face the redcoats at Lexington in 1775, the wives, boys and old men they left behind in Framingham took up axes, clubs, and pitchforks and barred themselves in their homes because of a widespread, and widely credited, rumor that the local slaves planned to rise up and massacre the white inhabitants while the militia was away.[2]

                                African bondage in the colonies north of the Mason-Dixon Line has left a legacy in the economics of modern America and in the racial attitudes of the U.S. working class. Yet comparatively little is written about the 200-year history of Northern slavery. Robert Steinfeld's deservedly praised "The Invention of Free Labor" (1991) states, "By 1804 slavery had been abolished throughout New England," ignoring the 1800 census, which shows 1,488 slaves in New England. Recent archaeological discoveries of slave quarters or cemeteries in Philadelphia and New York City sometimes are written up in newspaper headlines as though they were exhibits of evidence in a case not yet settled (cf. “African Burial Ground Proves Northern Slavery,” The City Sun, Feb. 24, 1993).

                                I had written one book on Pennsylvania history and was starting a second before I learned that William Penn had been a slaveowner. The historian Joanne Pope Melish, who has written a perceptive book on race relations in ante-bellum New England, recalls how it was possible to read American history textbooks at the high school level and never know that there was such a thing as a slave north of the Mason-Dixon Line:

                                "In Connecticut in the 1950s, when I was growing up, the only slavery discussed in my history textbook was southern; New Englanders had marched south to end slavery. It was in Rhode Island, where I lived after 1964, that I first stumbled across an obscure reference to local slavery, but almost no one I asked knew anything about it. Members of the historical society did, but they assured me that slavery in Rhode Island had been brief and benign, involving only the best families, who behaved with genteel kindness. They pointed me in the direction of several antiquarian histories, which said about the same thing. Some of the people of color I met knew more."[3]
                                Slavery in the North never approached the numbers of the South. It was, numerically, a drop in the bucket compared to the South. But the South, comparatively, was itself a drop in the bucket of New World slavery. Roughly a million slaves were brought from Africa to the New World by the Spanish and Portuguese before the first handful reached Virginia. Some 500,000 slaves were brought to the United States (or the colonies it was built from) in the history of the slave trade, which is a mere fraction of the estimated 10 million Africans forced to the Americas during that period.
                                Every New World colony was, in some sense, a slave colony. French Canada, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Cuba, Brazil -- all of them made their start in an economic system built upon slavery based on race. In all of them, slavery enjoyed the service of the law and the sanction of religion. In all of them the master class had its moments of doubt, and the slaves plotted to escape or rebel.

                                Over time, slavery flourished in the Upper South and failed to do so in the North. But there were pockets of the North on the eve of the Revolution where slaves played key roles in the economic and social order: New York City and northern New Jersey, rural Pennsylvania, and the shipping towns of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Black populations in some places were much higher than they would be during the 19th century. More than 3,000 blacks lived in Rhode Island in 1748, amounting to 9.1 percent of the population; 4,600 blacks were in New Jersey in 1745, 7.5 percent of the population; and nearly 20,000 blacks lived in New York in 1771, 12.2 percent of the population.[4]

                                The North failed to develop large-scale agrarian slavery, such as later arose in the Deep South, but that had little to do with morality and much to do with climate and economy.

                                --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                The elements which characterized Southern slavery in the 19th century, and which New England abolitionists claimed to view with abhorrence, all were present from an early date in the North. Practices such as the breeding of slaves like animals for market, or the crime of slave mothers killing their infants, testify that slavery's brutalizing force was at work in New England. Philadelphia brickmaker John Coats was just one of the Northern masters who kept his slave workers in iron collars with hackles. Newspaper advertisements in the North offer abundant evidence of slave families broken up by sales or inheritance. One Boston ad of 1732, for example, lists a 19-year-old woman and her 6-month-old infant, to be sold either "together or apart."[5] Advertisements for runaways in New York and Philadelphia newspapers sometimes mention suspicions that they had gone off to try to find wives who had been sold to distant purchasers.

                                Generally, however, as the numbers of slaves were fewer in the North than in the South, the controls and tactics were less severe. The Puritan influence in Massachusetts lent a particular character to slavery there and sometimes eased its severity. On the other hand, the paternal interest that 19th century Southern owners attempted to cultivate for their slaves was absent in the North, for the most part, and the colonies there had to resort to laws to prevent masters from simply turning their slaves out in the streets when the slaves grew old or infirm. And across the North an evident pattern emerges: the more slaves lived in a place, the wider the controls, and the more brutal the punishments for transgressions.

                                --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                Slavery was still very much alive, and in some places even expanding, in the northern colonies of British North America in the generation before the American Revolution. The spirit of liberty in 1776 and the rhetoric of rebellion against tyranny made many Americans conscious of the hypocrisy of claiming natural human rights for themselves, while at the same time denying them to Africans. Nonetheless, most of the newly free states managed to postpone dealing with the issue of slavery, citing the emergency of the war with Britain.

                                That war, however, proved to be the real liberator of the northern slaves. Wherever it marched, the British army gave freedom to any slave who escaped within its lines. This was sound military policy: it disrupted the economic system that was sustaining the Revolution. Since the North saw much longer, and more extensive, incursions by British troops, its slave population drained away at a higher rate than the South's. At the same time, the governments in northern American states began to offer financial incentives to slaveowners who freed their black men, if the emancipated slaves then served in the state regiments fighting the British.

                                When the Northern states gave up the last remnants of legal slavery, in the generation after the Revolution, their motives were a mix of piety, morality, and ethics; fear of a growing black population; practical economics; and the fact that the Revolutionary War had broken the Northern slaveowners' power and drained off much of the slave population. An exception was New Jersey, where the slave population actually increased during the war. Slavery lingered there until the Civil War, with the state reporting 236 slaves in 1850 and 18 as late as 1860.

                                The business of emancipation in the North amounted to the simple matters of, 1. determining how to compensate slaveowners for the few slaves they had left, and, 2. making sure newly freed slaves would be marginalized economically and politically in their home communities, and that nothing in the state's constitution would encourage fugitive slaves from elsewhere to settle there.

                                But in the generally conservative, local process of emancipating a small number of Northern slaves, the Northern leadership turned its back on slavery as a national problem.
                                (Bold emphasis mine :)))

                                Original article: Slavery in the North

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