Topic: Judgment

Title: The Judgment That Saved American Liberty: Why Confederation Failed

The Articles of Confederation are enjoying a curious revival among certain corners of the internet. You hear it in podcast debates, see it in hot takes on social media, and read it in think pieces that claim the original American design was more libertarian than what came after. Each state had a veto, the argument goes. Unanimous consent was required for major decisions. The national government could barely do anything. That sounds like real liberty to some people. It sounds like paradise to anyone who distrusts centralized power.

It also sounds like something written by people who have never actually studied what life was like under the Articles. The Founders lived through that experiment. They did not abandon it because they suddenly fell in love with big government. They abandoned it because they saw with their own eyes that confederal government does not protect individual freedom. It destroys it in a different way. The unique lesson that rarely gets discussed is this: requiring unanimous consent does not prevent tyranny. It simply hands the power to tyrannize to the most stubborn, most selfish minority, while leaving the individual citizen completely defenseless against his own state government.

The romanticism of gridlock is powerful. On paper, a system where nothing can happen without everyone agreeing sounds like the ultimate safeguard against majority oppression. But the Founders understood something that the modern confederation enthusiasts miss. A government that cannot act is not a government that protects liberty. It is a government that guarantees chaos, and chaos is the enemy of every freedom except the freedom to starve.

Under the Articles, the national government had no power to tax. It could only request money from the states, and the states routinely ignored those requests. It had no power to regulate interstate commerce, so states imposed tariffs on each other, treating neighboring states like foreign countries. It had no power to raise an army, so when Shays Rebellion broke out in Massachusetts, the national government had to watch helplessly as armed farmers shut down courts and threatened the entire legal order. The rebellion was eventually put down by a privately funded militia, not by the United States government, because the United States government could not afford to act.

That is not liberty. That is the collapse of civil order.

Thomas Sowell taught us to judge policies by their results, not their intentions. The intention of the Articles was to keep power close to the people. The result was economic paralysis, political gridlock, and a nation that could not defend itself or enforce its own treaties. The British refused to evacuate forts on American soil because they knew the national government had no power to compel the states to honor the peace treaty. American merchants could not trade freely across state lines. Debtors demanded paper money and relief laws, and states like Rhode Island obliged, effectively legalizing theft from creditors within their borders.

The Founders saw all of this and drew a conclusion that the confederation romantics refuse to accept. A system that requires unanimous consent does not prevent tyranny. It just changes who the tyrant is. Instead of a majority imposing its will, you get a single state imposing its veto on everyone else. That is not minority rights. That is minority rule.

James Madison understood this better than anyone. In Federalist Number 20, he wrote that under the Articles, the practice of many states in restricting the power of their own legislatures had made the national government a shadow without substance. A single state could block any reform, no matter how necessary, and that state was often pursuing its own narrow self-interest rather than any principled defense of liberty. Rhode Island, the smallest state with the most to gain from a chaotic monetary system, blocked every attempt to strengthen the national government. It refused to even send delegates to the Constitutional Convention. It printed its own paper money and made it legal tender for all debts, wiping out the savings of anyone who had extended credit within its borders.

That is not liberty. That is the tyranny of the most reckless minority.

The other blind spot in the confederation argument is the assumption that state governments will always protect your rights. History proves otherwise. Under the Articles, states routinely violated the rights of their own citizens. Religious dissenters were persecuted. Debtors were imprisoned indefinitely. Speech was suppressed. There was no federal Bill of Rights, no Fourteenth Amendment, no Supreme Court empowered to strike down state laws. If your state government decided to ride roughshod over your rights, you had nowhere to appeal. There was no higher authority to protect you.

Madison addressed this directly in Federalist Number 10. He argued that small republics are actually more vulnerable to majority faction than large ones. In a small community, a local majority can more easily unite to persecute a minority. A large federal republic dilutes those dangerous factions, making it harder for any single group to dominate. The Founders did not create a stronger national government because they wanted to oppress people. They created it because they understood that local control can be just as oppressive as centralized control, and that the only way to protect individual liberty is to divide power so carefully that no single level can abuse it.

That is the key insight that the confederation enthusiasts miss. Federalism is not about handing all power to the states. It is about dividing power between the states and a limited central government so that neither can become oppressive. The Constitution gave the national government just enough authority to secure fundamental rights, regulate interstate commerce, and provide for the common defense. It strictly enumerated those powers and reserved everything else to the states. It also created a system of checks and balances across three branches of the federal government itself. The confederal model had none of that. It had a single weak congress with no executive, no judiciary, and no way to enforce its own decisions.

Henry Hazlitt taught us to see the unseen consequences. The visible effect of a weak national government under the Articles was that states had more power. The unseen effect was economic collapse, destroyed trade, and a nation unable to defend itself. Milton Friedman would point out that economic freedom requires a stable framework of law, contract enforcement, and a uniform currency. The Articles provided none of that. Each state printed its own money, imposed its own tariffs, and passed its own debtor relief laws. Interstate commerce became impossible. Friedrich Hayek would note the knowledge problem. No central planner can gather the dispersed information needed to run an economy, but a confederation of states with competing currencies and trade barriers prevents the spontaneous order of a unified market from emerging. The Founders did not need Austrian economics to see this. They lived through it every single day.

The modern parallel is instructive. Look at the European Union today. It operates on a confederal style structure where member states often have veto power over major decisions. The result is paralysis on migration, Hungary and Poland blocking sanctions and rule of law enforcement, a monetary union without a fiscal union leading to debt crises in Greece and Italy. Decision making held hostage by the least cooperative member. The same dynamic that killed the Articles is slowly strangling European unity. Unanimous consent does not produce liberty. It produces gridlock, resentment, and the gradual erosion of the trust that makes voluntary cooperation possible.

The Constitution that the Founders wrote in 1787 was not a power grab. It was a carefully calibrated response to the failure of confederation. They created a federal republic, a government of limited enumerated powers that could actually act when needed but was strictly constrained by the Constitution, separation of powers, and the Bill of Rights. Antonin Scalia, channeling the Founders, would say the Constitution is an enduring document, not a living one. Its structure was designed to endure precisely because it avoided both the weakness of confederation and the tyranny of centralized dictatorship. It gave the national government just enough authority to secure liberty and prosperity.

Next time you hear someone romanticize the Articles of Confederation, ask them one question. Who protects the individual when his state government decides to violate his rights? Under a true confederation, no one. The Founders tried it. It failed. They learned, and they built something better. A constitutional federation that balances power, protects individual rights, and allows a free people to govern themselves without being paralyzed by the lowest common denominator of state consent.

Liberty does not come from making government impossible. It comes from making government limited, accountable, and structured to check every concentration of power, whether it is a majority at the center or a minority in a single state. That is the lesson the Founders learned through bitter experience, and it is the one the confederation romantics keep forgetting. The judgment they exercised in rejecting the Articles was not a betrayal of the Revolution. It was the thing that saved it.