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The Brilliant Simplicity of the United States Constitution

February 22, 2012 By Walter Bagehot Leave a Comment

Ryan Young of the Competitive Enterprise Institute today had this to say about the U.S. Constitution, in an article entitled “Simplicity is Beautiful: How to build a democracy“:

The U.S. Constitution is a model of simplicity. That’s the secret of its success. You can read the whole thing in under a half hour. It’s only about 8,000 words long, including the amendments. It doesn’t need to outline the specifics of agricultural or trade policy. That’s Congress’s job.

The European Union’s de facto constitution is quite different. It runs well over 200 pages. Where the U.S. Constitution paints with a broad brush, the E.U.’s constitution fills in every last detail. According to a forthcoming study by David Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia, new democracies are increasingly turning to the E.U.’s top-down model and rejecting the U.S. Constitution’s more bottom-up approach.

I could not agree more with these statements, and with the points he makes in the rest of the piece.  But is the U.S. Constitution a sufficient point of departure for fledgling democracies? …[Read More...]