June 17, 2019
The Forgotten Bargain that Made America
By Robert Curry
How did we Americans get ourselves into the mess we are now in?
It's a complicated story. It started when the American people broke a bargain honorably made. And not just any bargain. The bargain that was broken was the founding bargain, the bargain that made America.
George Washington's original Cabinet defines that founding bargain for us. It is a truism that Washington's Cabinet was the greatest one America has ever had. Washington had Jefferson at State, Alexander Hamilton at Treasury, Henry Knox at the War Department, and Edmund Randolph as the attorney general.
But instead of focusing on this dazzling array of excellence, let's consider what the brevity of that list tells us about the founding bargain. The federal government was designed to be limited government. Madison wrote in The Federalist, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined." Those few and defined powers are made perfectly clear by the offices these great men occupied. The federal government was to take responsibility for America's relations with foreign states — in Madison's words, "war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce." The federal government was also to take responsibility for commerce among the American states to provide a nationwide free market that would make possible America's world-changing economic success. All other governmental powers were to be retained by the individual states that were joining to form the new nation, the United States of America.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/the_forgotten_bargain_that_made_america.html
