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.
Actually that was precisely your argument - that the ideal of limited government as enshrined in the original intent of our Constitution was invalidated because of the limited extent of the vote. If I may quote:
Slyfox696 said:
AlbqOwl said:
WHEREAS the United States was conceived as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people; and
Nostalgia is fun. Brainwashing is fun.
The United States was conceived as "a government of the people, by the people and for the people"...as long as the people were white, land-owning Christian men. Everyone else...not so much.
If you now wish to
amend that argument, you are free to do so. But let us not go around pretending that you did not
start from it.
*sigh*
See above and then get back to me about lazy and inaccurate arguments.
:lol: your counter to me demonstrating that your argument was lazy and inaccurate was to reply with "see above"?
:yawn: See above for my pre-rebuttal of this lazy response
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.
False argument and implication - firstly, no government ever held that blacks were not human, and secondly the Federal Government enforced slavery just as much as the slave states did.
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.
:shrug: then the equivalent thereof - the fact remains that the federal government has expanded far beyond the reach of the
total sum of government in the late 18th and early 19th century.
Oh, a he-said-she-said? Okay. Yes it is.
Of course they have. States are regularly attempting to deny its citizens basic and fundamental rights, even today.
and are no more or less likely to than the federal government.
How many states are passing Voter ID laws to prevent voter fraud which does not exist?
A) voter fraud does exist
B) Voter ID is not removing anyone's rights. The government already demands that you provide proof of identity in order to access portions of government particular to you - voting is no different.
North Carolina recently added to their constitution an amendment prohibiting gays to marry (while still legally allowing first cousins to do so).
which is well within their rights, just as it has always been.
Texas is pushing hard to remove the theory of evolution from the classroom in favor of creationism.
which is equally
not an imposition on anyone's rights.
you appear to have "doing things I disapprove of" confused with "abusing people's rights".
States have not and are not using the power fairly.
Of course they aren't. Neither is the Federal Government. The main difference being that State governments are more immediately accountable to the people whom they may abuse, whereas the Federal Government is less so.
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.
:lol: yeah. Because if there is one entity we can trust with unchecked power, it's the one that's least accountable. That'll work great.
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.
Oh wow. You're so cosmopolitan. You can talk to someone in Japan? Oh man. You must have used a really big megaphone.
I lived in Japan for three years. I have traveled (even by using those giant, magic, flying, hollowed-out birds) across portions of five continents, video-teleconferenced in real time literally across the globe in order to plan the years-out sync of satellite, plane, hardware, and the physical and information effects of both kinetic and non-kinetic energy, and dealt with enabling civil society across the full spectrum of development - from the challenge of getting clean water to dealing with disaster when nuclear plants begin to spew radiation and threaten to go into meltdown. Between the two of us, I'm
betting that I'm the only one that has ever
actually launched, controlled, and then recovered military UAVs. But please, tell me more about how you drove 10 miles for lunch, and how that experience demonstrated for you that
need v
want is what drove the historical expansion of the Federal Government. I can't
wait to hear how driving between North Carolina and Missouri invalidates the history of the Progressive Era.
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.
There is a sharp distinction between taking on
more and taking on
as much as it has. For example, we need a standing Navy, and the Federal Government is the only one that can really provide that. We need some form of the EPA to ensure that states do not dump on each other, and the Federal Government is the proper home for that. But we do
not require the Federal Government to ensure that we use politically correct lightbulbs, shower-heads, and toilets. Modern society does
not require that the Federal government reach as it has, or do most of what it does.