The framers' coup
"Based on prodigious research and told largely through the voices of the participants, Michael Klarman's The Framers' Coup narrates how the Framers' clashing interests shaped the Constitution--and American history itself. & Not only does Klarman capture the knife's-edge atmosphere of the convention, he populates his narrative with riveting and colorful stories. & The Framers' Coup is more than a compendium of great stories, however, and the powerful arguments that feature throughout will reshape our understanding of the nation's founding. Simply put, the Constitutional Convention almost didn't happen, and once it happened, it almost failed. And, even after the convention succeeded, the Constitution it produced almost failed to be ratified. Just as importantly, the Constitution was hardly the product of philosophical reflections by brilliant, disinterested statesmen, but rather ordinary interest group politics. Multiple conflicting interests had a say, from creditors and debtors to city dwellers and backwoodsmen. The upper class overwhelmingly supported the Constitution; many working class colonists were more dubious. Slave states and nonslave states had different perspectives on how well the Constitution served their interests. Ultimately, both the Constitution's content and its ratification process raise troubling questions about democratic legitimacy.
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What Hacker News says
- If you're not American, one thing that you have to keep in mind whenever you hear "there's large public support in the US for [insert vaguely left-wing thing here] but nothing gets done about it" is that the US's system of government is really only vaguely a democracy. It gives a disproportionate amount of power to conservative rural voters at the expense of everybody else.
This is exemplified in the Senate, which is the least representative legislative body of any democracy I am aware of. Each state gets 2 votes regardless of population, so Wyoming (population ~550,000) is given the same amount of votes as California (population ~39,000,000). Any remotely controversial piece of legislation needs to pass the Senate with a 60% majority. This means that 21 Republican states making up ~20% of the population can block any bill they don't want to pass. Senators are also elected for 6 year terms, which limits how accountable they are to their constituents.
If a bill gets past the Senate, it makes its way to the president, who has veto power over all legislation. The president is elected by electors selected by the states rather than individual voters, and the number of electors is not fairly apportioned either. For example, there are ~728,000 people per elector in California, but ~196,000 people per elector in Wyoming.
In effect, this means that public opinion has essentially no impact on the legislation the US government passes. A 2014 Princeton study ( https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th... ) found that "When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."
If you're interested in why the system was designed this way, I highly recommend the book "The Framers' Coup" by Michael Klarman.
- The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon. Really fantastic book about the changes in American society over the last two centuries. Argues that the impacts of new technology are decreasing over time.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
Genius Foods by Max Lugavere
Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg
The Framers Coup by Michael Klarman
Leadership by George MacGregor Burns
Strategy by Lawrence Freedman
Several books by Joseph Campbell or Peter Drucker. Can't go wrong with either.
- Read this book and tell me America is a free market: https://www.amazon.com/Framers-Coup-Making-United-Constituti...
In short:
1. A big chunk of the issues leading to today's constitution were tax and debt relief measures being instituted by the states in response to populist movements.
2. The framers were mostly very wealthy and biased toward preservation of capital.
3. Many of the measures instituted in the constitution were designed to preserve wealthy Americans' property (slaves, for instance). Populist debt relief efforts made this an especially high priority.
4. The only way to get the states to ratify the constitution was to concede many populist goals (state legislators were largely very wealthy as well, and apparently stubbornly pessimistic about the constitution despite its immediate necessity).
The book goes into great detail on the reasoning and compromises made to create the constitution. I think you will find that politics rigidly define the operation of our markets.
I get where you're coming from but you have some insufficient assumptions about the context in which this particular complex system operates.
