Northfield is a state of mind.

[Remind me to find the Northfield story to link to the previous post. I don't like to put links in the titles because they get bleeped up if they're too long.]
[Back to what I started to say.]

Kinda like Shay's Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion. I saw some dude criticizing L. Neil Smith for his position supporting the anti-Federalists rhetorically asking, "hasn't he ever heard of Shay's Rebellion?" Shay's Rebellion was indeed a crisis, but the Hamiltonian solution we ended up with was an over-reaction, I believe Smith would say. The delegates were sent to what became the Constitutional Convention to amend the Articles of Confederation, not to completely revamp the arrangement.

It's a funny thing, when you look at it, that all these rebellions, including the Granger Movement, and even the James Gang were reactions to unfair actions of governments; either unfair taxation or unfair grants of monopolies (it is still a controversial matter how to do either of those things fairly; along with subsidies, regulations and protective tariffs).

I haven't prepared an outline for a major Den Beste-style essay, here, although the subject deserves it. Murray Rothbard covers all this, I believe, in Conceived in Liberty. So I hear anyway. I can't afford that set of books yet.

Without further study, my comments at this time would be that:

1. Shays Rebellion was resolved before the Constitutional Convention. The Confederation handled it, though

2. the monied interests didn't learn their lesson as evidenced by the Whiskey Rebellion. It was pretty much the same crap even under the Constitution.

3. Leftist analysis often does a good job of identifying the problems and some of the underlying causes, though they never quite get to the root cause (our governments are made up of fallible human beings whose powers must be limited to keep any of us from causing too much harm; no System will ever overcome the simple human fact that wise people die and ignorant people are born).