There have been three major releases of the United States operating system.
Version 1.0 was the Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1777. It failed because it couldn't properly balance the conflicting interests of the central government and the states.
Delegates sent to a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation ignored their charter and in 1788 launched Version 2.0 of the United States, the US Constitution. It could be argued that the Bill of Rights deserves a new version number, but given that it was in the works at the time of the prior release, we'll call it Version 2.1.
This version worked fairly well for four score or so years, when it finally failed because a design flaw in the operating system caused the civility between the two fundamentally different cultures to break. One culture destroyed the other, and Version 3.0 of the United States was launched in 1865 with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.
Rarely is Version 1.0 of any innovation ultimately successful, government or otherwise, and it's unreasonable for us to expect that it will be.
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3 comments:
Version 4.0 should re-legitimize the voting process by bringing it into the 21st century.
For years, I've been proposing a Service Pack for the U.S. Constitution. Take a look at http://www.digitaldixie.com/amendments ...first posted five years ago, and still relevant today!
Stephen
Intersting.
Endorsing free trade, prohibiting gun control, repealing the income tax, and getting the federal government out of drug enforcement aren't going to be "hot-button emotional amendments?"
We didn't even get to taking money out of the pocket of trial lawyers :)
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