Thread by @Gitabushi

The US Constitution was a great innovation.
The best thing about it is the Founders understood that concentrated power is a pure evil.
The whole point of the US Constitution was to decentralize and diffuse power.

But they made a few mistakes.

1) they probably should have put a few of the Federalist Paper explanations into the Constitution itself.
I mean, explaining that the point of the Senate system and Electoral College is *specifically* to diffuse power and protect minority viewpoints would probably help right now.

2) They knew that Judicial Branch oversight was going to be problematic. They thought by not granting that power, they could avoid the issues...maybe until they could think of something?
But the Judicial Branch seized the power.
No one squawked because it obviously made sense.

But being a Seized Power, there were no rules.
For instance, if it had been an assigned power, they could have insisted all SCOTUS could do is strike down law, not modify it. They could have specified how rulings were made.

Instead, SCOTUS rulings are actually treated with the same weight as Amendments to the US Constitution.
They are modifications and clarifications of the Constitution, and the rulings are treated as just as inviolable.
Roe v Wade *was* like an Amendment.

But getting a bad SCOTUS ruling is much easier than getting a pernicious Amendment.
And, for some reason, Leftist lower courts and judges feel much more able to ignore rulings like Heller, while claiming Roe v Wade is inviolable, for some reason.

But I've recently thought of two more things they missed.
Or, perhaps, things that have become clear in the fullness of time as people have had more than 2 centuries to exploit loopholes and degrade standards.

3) The Founders assumed that liberty was such an obvious Good that the incentives aligned for everyone to protect it.
But Leftism seeks collectivism. So they have incentives to destroy liberty and the system supporting it.

In fact, most of the time, when things are going awry, it's because the incentives are not aligned well.
Like student loans and college costs.
Colleges have no incentive to actually educate kids into a workable degree.
They have every incentive to let you linger on for years.

The lenders have no incentive, because the loans were backed by govt.
Now the govt has no incentive to collect those loans, because they have decided there is no penalty for massive deficit spending.
It's merely another form of wealth transfer...Just to themselves, not the poor.

The counselors helping kids to decide what to major in and whether to take out loans are all employed by the schools.

One simple fix re-aligns incentives and fixes the problem for good, and deals a serious blow to Leftism:

Pass a law that schools must fund all loans, no fed govt guarantee.

And make the loans dischargable in bankruptcy.

Now schools can be as woke/progressive as they want to be...with THEIR endowment money.
If they encourage kids to graduate quickly into lucrative jobs, they get their loan money back quickly to loan to other students.
If the kid lingers and drops out: they lose all repayment.

if forgiving loans is a Progressive Good that benefits society, then the colleges can do that. No need to involve taxpayers who paid back their loans or who never took out loans or who never even had the chance to go to college.

So I think adding a new Bill of Rights...maybe Bill of Incentives? Could help fix a lot of problems.
Like no counting illegal aliens for federal cash or representation apportionment. That's a bad incentive.
Other incentives could encourage clean rolls and voter ID.

4) The Bureaucracy.
We used to have a spoils system. That cleaned out dead wood.
But the govt got too big. The civil service system was SUPPOSED to reduce partisanship.
But when one party became the party of Big Govt, it aligned the incentives for the bureaucracy to support it.

Bureaucracies are not ALL bad.
They are really good at creating a system that runs almost on its own, so that it can drag the incompetent up to competence.
The bad thing is, it drags the excellent down to merely competent, too.

And when a bureaucracy has gone on for very long, probably even just 20 years, it begins to exist for itself, rather than for citizens or even for outcomes.
That's why Trump could eliminate literally thousands of regulations without degrading govt, but saving citizens billions.

The bureaucracy is why, as Sowell pointed out, our welfare offices count their success by the number of people they have ON their rolls receiving welfare, not the number they have gotten to move OFF the rolls.

In some ways, it's just another incentivization problem.

But in other ways, I think we need clear Constitutional rules that will diffuse that power, too. Regular clearing out. Stop making a govt job be so much better than civilian counterparts. Get agencies out of DC, etc.

So, I think after 200+ years, it's time for a Constitutional Convention.
We need to fix the problems with SCOTUS rulings, incentivization to play within instead of degrading the system, and tame the bureaucracy...and maybe include a few more explicit instructions, like for the 2A