blog 5

There were many issues that the founding fathers had to wrestle with, before they finalized the constitution. They had to decide which government form to chose, how to use it, what powers to give it, what powers the states would retain, etc. These issues were complicated a lot by the recent enlightenment in Europe, with which the founding fathers were intimately familiar. There were a great amount of enlightenment proposals on how government should work. The founding fathers were familiar with Locke, who proposed natural rights, as we have seen in the declaration of independence which almost exactly quoted locke, the only variation being the change from the pursuit of property to the pursuit of happiness. Having already established that there were some universal rights, and that the purpose of government was to protect these natural and universal rights, the founding fathers were now left to choose what government system could best protect the rights of the people. There were many forms of government to choose from, and all of them had advantages and the founding fathers knew this. the first attempt at governing the united states the articles of confederation was not a good government system. The government under the articles of confederation was incredibly weak, it had no power to tax, it could not print money, it did not establish a national army, and it could not pass resolutions without unanimous vote, essentially the states were independent nations bound by an alliance. The founding fathers saw that this did not work, and thus were more inclined to have a central government with real authority, however some were inclined to go back to a monarchy, pr similar institution, because they believed that since the articles of confederation had not worked democracy could not work with all of the states. This was of course not a very popular option among the founding fathers, given their recent expierience with the abuse of power in the British monarchy. Of course democracy had it's defenders as well, however the support for general direct democracy was greatly decreased by shay's rebellion. which showed the americans just how dangerous mobs could be. The exclusion of the two extremes still left a plethora of government systems many of which were theoretical, and untried. The founding fathers chose to develop a new system of their own, one that would protect the rights of the people, but also prevent the mob rule, and anarchy that the articles of confederation allowed. Unfortuneately, as the founding fathers knew, governments tended to become corrupt. Any existing government system, even most of the theoritical ones, no matter how good it started would eventually deteriorate into anarchy or tryranny. Therefore if the founding fathers wanted to make a lasting government they would have to prevent this from happening, by allowing the government to be flexible to meet the new challenges, thus preventing anarchy. They would also have to have a system to ensure that the government could not easily become corrupted. This was what led to the system of checks and balances, which made sure that no one person had all the power in the government, and that all of the branches of government had ways to prevent the others from unrighteously excercising their authority. Furthermore the founding fathers left much of the power traditionally laying with central governments with the state governments, which could if the situation dictated, join against the central government to prevent the federal government from abusing its power. Clearly the founding fathers had a lot to think about when framing the constitution, and if I may say so, they did an excellent job with it, although it seems we disregard their laws quite a bit.