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Paul Campos & the Constitution

Thursday, November 15 at 2:00 PM

Will Ropke of Franktown writes:

There is great irony in Paul Campos’s observation (today) that the US Constitution is outdated. The reason it seems outdated today is that it has been subverted and ignored in the past. The original purpose of the Constitution was to limit the power and scope of the federal government * vis-à-vis* the states and the individual citizens. When the federal government was very small, it didn’t matter that it wasn’t very democratic (and there were good reasons for it not to be).
But like professors Campos and Levinson, I too have fallen out of love with the Constitution. A document can never limit the power of a government, because it is “interpreted” by that same government itself. It is inevitable that, over time, the Supreme Court will, by and large, “discover”
that the Constitution authorizes ever greater power to its host. What we really need are highly decentralized governments, even down to individual communities. Democracy can work only on a very small scale. Mass democracy invariably becomes an engine to allow favored interests (large corporations, government bureaucracies, defense contractors, big banks, etc.) to loot the mass of productive citizens who are just trying to live their lives in peace.

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