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Federalist No. 21 Explained: A Government With No Teeth
For three papers the founders toured a graveyard of foreign confederacies; now Hamilton turns the lamp on America's own government and starts naming, one by one, exactly what was broken in the Articles of Confederation. He lands on three crippling flaws: a government with no power to make anyone obey it, a union with no power to stop one of its own states from being toppled by force, and a money system so unfair it tried to measure a state's wealth by counting its acres. Along the way he points to Shays' Rebellion and asks the chilling question of what would have happened if those desperate…
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