Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States

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1. monocasaMar 2021
   > That the United States is essentially a slave state, and that all of the wealth was created on the backs of slavery

   I mean, all of that is true.

   Nobody thinks that the founding fathers were B movie villains, only that they were overwhelmingly a set of people looking to maintain and increase their power leveraging their ability to own people like cattle, and steal land from the people who were already here as an economic concentrate and multiplier.

   Treating them as infallible gods who were uncompromisingly dedicated to the public good holds our country back from what it could be.

   I'd recommend An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles A. Beard as a introduction into how the constitution was designed to reinforce the power structures holding up the people who wrote it.

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2. SaberTailNov 2020
   also worth a read is "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States" by Charles Beard which examines how the personal financial interests of the founding fathers shaped the constitution
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3. SaberTailOct 2022
   Yeah, exactly. There's so much propaganda in the USA depicting the constitution as some sort of inspired document written by enlightened men, and then most people don't bother reading beyond what they learned in school.

   One only need look at how undemocratic the constitution was. Only one federal office, the House of Representatives, was elected by the people (and at the time the constitution was written, only men with property could vote). The president and vice president are elected by an electoral college. Senators were elected by state legislatures. Supreme Court Judges are even further insulated from the people, being appointed by the President. "The People" had extremely little influence on the federal government, and it's only gotten marginally better since.

   Hopefully everyone understands how much the constitution did to protect the wealth of slave owners, since this is taught in schools. But it also made western land speculators richer by creating a government capable of exerting sufficient power over those western lands to open them up for settlement. It made the holders of revolutionary war debt richer by creating a government that could assume that debt and pay it off. It made owners and investors in manufacturing enterprises richer by creating a government that could protect industry with tariffs while keeping states from taxing the flow of goods or interfering with contracts.

   Every framer of the constitution belonged to at least one of these groups, and they benefited when it was ratified. The book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles Beard goes into great detail on this. It's out of copyright and freely available online: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Economic_Interpretation_of...

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