The Federalist #2 - Rights and Being "Near Enough"

Great Debates
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Here’s the long awaited continuation to the proposed look at the Federalist Papers. The previous foray fizzled and died due to me having an insane work schedule and overall starting off badly in trying to create debate when there wasn’t much substantial to debate in the first place. (F#1 was afterall just a preamble.)

I won’t be maintaining any set schedule, just sort of moseying on to the next as the previous thread poops out.

The Federalist #2

Points made in the paper:

  1. People need government, and subsequently need to accept a loss of some number of rights.
  2. We’re all white, English speaking Christians who have teamed up before, so it makes sense to stay together. We’ve also already entered into some treaties and other arrangements as a single nation.
  3. While there are naysayers, you have to recall that the people who made the recommendation for Federalism are all respected individuals whom you, the people, have voted for to represent you in the past and that this is their recommendation to you.

Some possible Devil’s Advocate points:
RE #1) Smaller, more local government will be less likely to remove as many rights.
RE #2) And yet, in the end the nation entered into a Civil War 60 years later due to different beliefs and impinging rights forced upon vastly disparate areas.

So the most likely topic of debate for this article would be the basic assumption that “People need to give up rights to government, and you should try to encompass as many people as possible with a near-enough belief system into a single government.” And of course, how are you to determine when “near-enough” is near enough. Or, are the inevitable civil wars worth it in the long run?

I think it’s wiser to save debate on the latter part of point #2 (commited treaties) as one of the later papers specifically deals with this topic.

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To give my own answers…

I don’t think that it’s necessarily correct to view laws as impinging on “rights.” I say this principally because I don’t know that in the majority of cases that one can say which course is allowing for more or fewer freedoms. Are more rights preserved to allow people to take slaves, or to disallow you to remove another human’s rights? The absence of law doesn’t strike me as creating the land with the most rights, on the contrary it just allows for a dog eats dog world where anyone only has as many rights as they can get away with without other people coming over and exercising their right to whack him on the head.

There’s no mathematical way to say that allowing murder allows more rights, when those murdered had their right to life taken away.

Government doesn’t remove the rights of the people, it works to preserve their rights from being usurped by other people. So the only right that government removes is the right to harm other people’s rights. (Of course, one could view slaves as not being part of the populace, and thus irrelevant to the government as being anything more than property–so none of that is necessarily an argument towards preserving freedom for everyone.)

So with all that in mind, the question is how many people should be enfranchised under and protected by a government? Are you best to try and make everyone be as similar as possible, or as different from one another as possible?

To me it seems that the greater and more varied the populace the greater the chancer there are for seeing to it that rival ideas will emerge and point out places where rights are being usurped. Limitting the populace doesn’t preserve more rights, rather it allows the biggest dogs to stay the biggest dogs. Under this model, theoretically, over time more and more people would become enfranchised and more rights would actually become protected.

So for me, it seems like the greater the melting pot that you have, the greater the eventual number of freedoms you will eventually gain.

But, does a greater melting pot create the necessity for civil war and the possibility for the country to fragment over time? The US has become more peaceful as diversity has increased, while as largely homogenous nations tend to be the ones with greater internal strife at the least hint of anything foreign.

So perhaps the answer is that bigger and more variegated is better, but having those people not killing each other when you start the whole thing is also a prerequisite for a successful conglomeration.

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bump for Friday evening

I’d just note that this is a relevant topic to the EU at the moment given as they’re in a similar position as the US was two hundred odd years ago…