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Comment by lupire | Hacker News Reader

No, it was because the slave states didn't want to lose slavery in a Senate vote.

If you think CA is too populous for it's people deserve an equal vote, CA should be 6 states. But the slavers fought that too (Missouri Compromise).

State boundaries are legal constructs inherited from obsolete aristocracy, not meaningful cultural boundaries.

It makes no sense to solve a hypothetical tyranny of large states by replacing it with an actual tyranny of small states. The Constitution is We the People, not the We the States.

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That’s wildly incorrect.

1) At the time of the founding, the free-state/slave-state dichotomy was almost perfectly orthogonal to the big-state/little-state dichotomy. The plan for proportional representation in both houses was the Virginia Plan.

2) The Missouri Compromise had nothing to do with California being one state. When California was admitted to the union, it had significantly less population than South Dakota and North Dakota did when they were admitted to the union. The subsequent growth of California was an accident of history.

3) State boundaries are absolutely meaningful cultural boundaries. My wife is Oregonian and I’m from Virginia and we’re really different. Even the blue parts of both states are very different.

Also, we have freedom of movement in this country. The precision of the state boundaries doesn’t matter so much given that people can self select to the states that reflect their values.

> No, it was because the slave states didn't want to lose slavery in a Senate vote.

Here in Canada we have the same setup but without the historical baggage of slavery justifying it, so I don't think your reason holds up. There are good reasons for avoiding a tyranny of the majority.

For instance, the less populous states tend to be more rural and make most of your food. The more populous states are more urban and its people largely have little idea how food is made. I'm exaggerating a bit, but maybe give the states that are making your food an equal say in your nation as those that are eating that food.

> No, it was because the slave states didn't want to lose slavery in a Senate vote.

Sorry, that is simply not true. Virginia, a slave state, was by far the most populous state at the time the Constitution was adopted.

> Virginia, a slave state, was by far the most populous state at the time the Constitution was adopted.

Only if you count slaves and I don't see why you would in this context.

Women, children, and slaves were all counted for purposes of representation (slaves at 3/5 --- which made the slave states weaker, not stronger) even though they couldn't vote.

Children can't vote to this day but still count in terms of representation in the House.

Hence something called "3/5 compromise" which diluted political power of slave holders and while keeping slaves under their heel.

That is exactly correct.

It was the slave states that wanted slaves fully counted, while the free states didn't want them to count at all.

People who go off about "3/5 of a person" don't realize that doing that made the slave states weaker, not stronger.

> People who go off about "3/5 of a person" don't realize that doing that made the slave states weaker, not stronger.

That would be true only if the slaves could vote. Since they could not it made those states stronger.

No, it increased the political power of slave holders since slaves couldn't vote but were counted as if they could.

"We the People" of? Of what?

No, the Several States are the Sovereigns. They ceded a small amount of authority to the Federal government in a limited Federal Constitution that outlines the powers of the Federal government. See the 10th Amendment.

> No, the Several States are the Sovereigns. They ceded a small amount of authority to the Federal government in a limited Federal Constitution that outlines the powers of the Federal government. See the 10th Amendment.

That ended at Appomattox and with the ensuing Civil War Amendments - see the 14th Amendment.

Well said. Thank you. As a disenfranchised Californian I will bang this gavel until I die. The loss of the SALT deduction hit our finances tremendously. 1. Direct impact via higher taxes. 2. People fleeing the state for lower tax states because without the SALT deduction, we have a race to the bottom infrastructure-wise (not that we didn’t already, but the SALT deduction dampened the effect somewhat).

This is the kind of BS law that can only pass when small states get to run roughshod over large ones.

Why should the rest of the country subsidize your state's more burdensome tax regime? Removal of the SALT deduction just brings the federal tax code a bit closer to neutrality. If you choose to live in a place with high taxes, that's fine, but don't expect everyone else to help subsidize it.

Narrow definition of "neutrality".

What you're really going for is that the required service provision level by states should be as low as possible, and if any states wish to exceed that, other states should not need to subsidize it.

Which would perhaps be OK if we had a better democracy, and the decision of a state to provide a very low level of public services truly reflected the desires of its inhabitants. However, all evidence points to the idea that states which actually operate at these lower levels also do their very best to limit the political influence of those would seek higher public service levels.

What you're actually doing is allowing the priviledge of wealth (and power) in some states to percolate up to the federal level to make it harder for other states (and their own) to respond to public desire.

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