The Articles of Confederation’s Relevance Today

Neil Sinhababu has some interesting thoughts about the Articles of Confederation:

And as far as I can see, things were pretty awful. Without the power to tax, we couldn’t raise an army or give veterans their pensions. Since we didn’t have a proper navy, Barbary pirates would enslave our sailors. The money of an insolvent federal government became worthless. Since we hadn’t assembled into any sort of functional economic bloc, Europeans would abuse us in trade wars.

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More attention to this time period would make the valuable point that having a strong central government is a very helpful thing in the modern world. Without taking lots of power away from states and establishing a working federal government, we’d be in chaos with a failed currency, no army, a terrible economy, and enslaved sailors. The way we got out of those problems deserves to be a bigger part of our national myth than it is.

—Jasper Hart