On the contrary; universal suffrage is not required for representative government.
No one said it was. Please understand my argument in its entirety. You seem to just be picking out certain parts to respond to and ignoring/forgetting the argument as a whole.
You are attempting to criticize someone making a constitutional point about the size and scope of government by making a strawman argument about the franchise. It is a lazy and inaccurate argument.
*sigh*
See above and then get back to me about lazy and inaccurate arguments.
Sort of - the State was certainly more powerful, but it did not exercise anything close to the level of imposition that the federal government today aspires to.
False. We had states which legally held one race was inferior to another and the inferior race was not even human at all, but property of another.
There's no more control any government could exercise over its people than the slavery of them.
Any state legislator in the 18th or early 19th century suggesting the equivalent of mandating particular kinds of lightbulbs inside of people's own homes would have been laughed off the floor if he was serious
Probably, considering the light bulb wasn't even invented in the 18th century and not available in most homes throughout most (if not all) of the 19th.
But one only has to google "ridiculous state laws" to know silly and controlling laws have always been around. I like "Odd Florida Law: It used to be illegal to not wear clothes while taking a bath in a bathtub."
That is inaccurate in it's depiction of causality.
No, it's not.
The states have proven no less able to use power fairly (if anything, the opposite) than the Federal government.
Of course they have. States are regularly attempting to deny its citizens basic and fundamental rights, even today. How many states are passing Voter ID laws to prevent voter fraud which does not exist? North Carolina recently added to their constitution an amendment prohibiting gays to marry (while still legally allowing first cousins to do so). Texas is pushing hard to remove the theory of evolution from the classroom in favor of creationism.
States have not and are not using the power fairly. Combine that with the shrinking world in which we live and the federal government needs more power to make sure all citizens are treated equally and standards exist across all the states.
We began to heavily centralize governing functions because of an ideological predisposition
:roll:
Nonsense. We centralized government functions because we needed to and technology permitted it. You don't seem to understand the difference in the world today and the world of the late 1700s. You don't seem to appreciate the fact we can now use an airplane to travel across the ocean in only a few hours, a trip which once took weeks. You don't seem to appreciate we have technology to deliver missiles anywhere in the world at any time, as opposed to the muskets and bayonets used during the late 1700s. We can strike in unmanned aircraft, I can converse in real time with someone from Japan or Italy (at the same time even) and then can drive 10 miles up the road, have lunch, drive back and be back home in a little over an hour. I can travel from Missouri to North Carolina in 13 hours, instead of the weeks it once took. Technology has fundamentally changed the world and the people of the states are no longer self-contained, at least not to the degree they once were. A centralized government is increasingly necessary to handle the realities of today's world.
Are there things which would be better suited for the state and local governments? Absolutely. But those who lament the fact our federal government has increasingly taken on more responsibilities don't seem to appreciate the fact there's really no other way if we want to continue to develop as a nation and stay a leader of the world.