Remix.run Logo
comrade1234 5 hours ago

The postal service was in the constitution from the beginning - Washington signed it. But the wording is a bit weird - obviously there's supposed to be a postal service but now with how bad tings have become, who knows.

eru 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Huh, where's the postal service in the constitution?

As far as I can tell your constitution allows the federal level to regulate postal services, but it does not require the establishment of government snail mail.

comrade1234 4 hours ago | parent [-]

"The Congress shall have Power...To establish Post Offices and post Roads;"

The wording "shall" is what I meant by weird wording. But no roads? No post offices? Whatever. The constitution is extremely flawed and should be abandoned.

bulbar 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"Just build it from scratch, can't be that hard" - every software engineer at some point in the past.

It is that hard and even harder. An then you have the problem that politicians and societies have a hard time to decide on topics of much narrower scope and much smaller impact.

That said, I would love to for the US having a solid checks and balances system instead of the current system.

If you want to look at a case study regarding a 'more modern' constitution: the German (de facto) constitution is only around 80 years old.

eru an hour ago | parent [-]

Interestingly, both the US and German constitution were written explicitly to limit the power of the federal level. But in both systems the federal level grabbed more and more power as time went on. (Partially because that's also popular with the voters.)

eru 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> But no roads?

What's so confusing about that? Presumably the constitution assumes that normal roads are for the more local layers of government to deal with.

I interpret 'shall have power' to mean 'if they want to, they can do it'. Doesn't mean they have. Eg they have the power to levy tariffs on foreign trade, but the constitution is perfectly happy with free trade, too.

AnimalMuppet 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's quite a non sequitur there. The wording is weird, so we should abandon the entire constitution?

Not so fast, comrade. Not so fast. You've got a lot of work ahead of you to fill in the gaps in your logic here, before any of us are going to agree with your conclusion.

3 hours ago | parent [-]
[deleted]