> The modern welfare state, where millions of people are immediately hurt by the federal system grinding to a halt and stopping, would have been anathema to the framers.

So too would have been the dominance of corporate interests in the political system. But here we are.

So too would women, blacks, Asians, and the poor having the right to vote be anathema to them.

Why again do we really care about parsing exactly what the Founders would say about the modern world?

The United States went from a inhospitable backwoods outpost isolated from the entire developed world to the most powerful nation in the world in somewhere around 200 years. These numbers sound larger because we don't live very long but relative to the span of civilizations we are an unimaginable success. Many countries today have e.g. restaurants that predate our country by hundreds of years.

This is important for two reasons. The first is obvious - we did something very right. I don't think there's any single thing you can pinpoint as the secret sauce so I think it's very important to learn from and consider our entire system, its motivations, and rationale in a comprehensive but holistic fashion.

The second reason is perhaps even more important. Do you know what every great superpower before America has in common? They no longer exist. And in many cases not only do they no longer exist, but their former territory is in shambles. It's amazing, and disconcerting, to imagine that Spain was once a global superpower. The point of this is that it's critical to learn from the past, lest we repeat it. The stories may change, but the fundamental problems and decisions that nations face remain quite similar.

In 1910, for 266 years the Qing dynasty had ruled the most populous and, for a substantial period of time, the richest and most sophisticated country in history. Defenders of the dynasty pointed out its illustrious past and how, in the face of trying modern times, China needed to turn back to the traditions that had made it so successful for so long.

How'd that work out?

Same reason you’d want to understand the intent behind the design of a software system before you modify it. Afterwards, though, you still go ahead and modify it to meet new requirements.

Anyway, extending the franchise doesn’t really have anything to do with the prominence of the federal government, whereas the increasing power of corporations does.

The argument is that the modern software system has become so complex, worrying about what the intent of the original design is almost pointless. Say a single-user app that was originally written in assembly for PDP and has now evolved (or wrapped) into a multi-cluster, multi-zoned gRPC service - how important is the original intent when it was never designed for the current use case?

If you want to do good engineering work on a complex system, it's imperative to understand and remain laser-focused on what the system as a whole is actually trying to accomplish. The original intent is never irrelevant in that context. In fact, it's the foundation for evaluating all the subsequent decisions that resulted in "a multi-cluster, multi-zoned gRPC service".

Sure, but why do we hold the Founders in a particularly high regard? Instead of, say, countless 20th and 21st century politicians, scholars, and technocrats who have a lot more influence on the government as it exists today, most of whom who don't have views nearly as revolting as the Founders.

Who's likely to be able to bring a software system from 16.7.1 to 16.7.2? The team who built 16.7.1, or the team who wrote the pre-alpha version twenty years ago?

In many cases (including, I would argue, the current American political system), the people who wrote 16.7.1 are merely technicians without any coherent vision for long term purposes or principles. Why do we still talk about the Unix philosophy?

I follow what's happening in the craft beer world, and some brewers are up in arms due to the fact that the government has to approve labels for all beers that are sold across state lines, or else they could potentially face career ending fines. How on earth did we get from a limited federal government to one that acts as a morality police for beer labels?

That's pretty clearly interstate commerce. Not sure what approval is required, but presumably it at least covers accurate labeling of ABV.

Are craft brewers not capable of measuring ABV? Is the bureaucratic approval of a label any guarantee of a particular ABV for beer bottled using that approved label? Lots of ridiculous BS is contained within an overbroad interpretation of interstate commerce.

So we should leave those things to the states as was originally intended. The courts should never have tolerated the Federal government being allowed to do things which are not specifically enumerated in the first place.

That's where things started breaking down.

The 17th Amendment just made things worse.

As I recall, not even the military, at least not in any way like we're doing it now.