Our Constitution Wasnt Built for This.

[elleng]

'Exactly 230 years ago, on Sept. 17, 1787, a group of men in Philadelphia concluded a summer of sophisticated, impassioned debates about the fate of their fledgling nation. The document that emerged, our Constitution, is often thought of as part of an aristocratic counterrevolution that stands in contrast to the democratic revolution of 1776. But our Constitution has at least one radical feature: It isn’t designed for a society with economic inequality.

There are other things the Constitution wasn’t written for, of course. The founders didn’t foresee America becoming a global superpower. They didn’t plan for the internet or nuclear weapons. And they certainly couldn’t have imagined a former reality television star president. Commentators wring their hands over all of these transformations — though these days, they tend to focus on whether this country’s founding document can survive the current president.

But there is a different, and far more stubborn, risk that our country faces — and which, arguably, led to the TV star turned president in the first place. Our Constitution was not built for a country with so much wealth concentrated at the very top nor for the threats that invariably accompany it: oligarchs and populist demagogues.

From the ancient Greeks to the American founders, statesmen and political philosophers were obsessed with the problem of economic inequality. Unequal societies were subject to constant strife — even revolution. The rich would tyrannize the poor, and the poor would revolt against the rich. . .

Many in the founding generation believed America was exceptional because of the extraordinary degree of economic equality within the political community as they defined it.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/16/opinion/sunday/constitution-economy.html?

[Yupster]

1. The most important article of the Constitution is Article V

Where it lays out how to amend itself.

The founders knew very well they weren't going to cover every eventuality that would come up some day.

Therefore they included Article V explaining how the Constitution could be amended, and they put in the Tenth Amendment giving a default power to the states for any power not given specifically to the federal government.

As far as there not being inequity of wealth back then, I question that. On one side you had rich plantation owners who owned many miles of the best farmland and often hundreds of slaves to work it. On the other hand you had slaves, indentured servants, and frontier farmers trying to eke out a living on a mountainside farm.

Is that so different from today?