Regarding Samuelson’s view points, I have this to say.

When one man is compelled to serve another man that is when service becomes slavery. How does using government as the instrument of force change that? It does not. As a Christian, Samuelson ought to have a supreme regard for his and other’s God given agency or free will. Agency was the key issue in the War in Heaven and it continues to be the key issue here on earth. Has Satan’s objective changed? Is Satan opposed to using government to achieve his ends? The answers are No and No.

Lastly, I believe that religion and morality have much to offer to science and that science has much to offer to religion and morality. It is truth that should be taught in our homes, our schools, and our churches. I believe God loves the earnest seekers of truth. It is why I find his proclamation of his Christian ideal of service to be at odds with his statement on scientist education. For if this is his view then he should apply it to the science of politics as well and he should keep statements like, “I’m a liberal because I am Christian” out of the discussion. Statements like these imply anyone who differs from him in beliefs is unchristian. That is not true.

Mr. Samuelson is obviously misled. Unfortunately, someone like him, a prominent figure in Mormon Arts, is bound to have an influence on others who admire him and his work. I wish there were more “high profile” people who were on the right track on this subject who were willing to speak up.

I wouldn’t say that every one of Samuelson’s points is completely wrong, however, though I’ve argued many of these points of Constitutional ambiguity before. It’s definitely motivated by the same type of self-assuredness and confidence in one’s opinion that really can’t be trusted.

I agree with most everything you said Connor, so like David, I don’t like to nit pick, but I thought I would comment on your claim that “it was the Founders who succeeded in sowing the seeds of [slavery’s] eventual demise.

I revere the founders as well as the Constitution, but I have to take the position that despite the many genius features of the document in 1787, it was also pro-slavery, and the founders as a collective whole designed it so. Further, it was the Constitution’s pro-slavery features, particularly the 3/5 clause, which caused it to fail—roughly 70 years later—to do its first stated purpose: “form a more perfect Union.” The Constitution quite literally stopped working at that later moment, and it took hundreds of thousands of lives and radical revisions to fix it.

The 3/5 clause was pro-slavery because it provided a powerful incentive to have as many slaves as possible. “The more slaves the Deep South could import from the African continent—innocents born in freedom and kidnapped across and ocean to be sold on auction blocks—the more seats [a state] would earn in the American Congress” (Akhil Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography, 90). Gouverneur Morris pointed this out at the convention in scathing terms: “The inhabitant of Georgia and S.C. who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity terams away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections & damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a Govt. instituted for protection of of the rights of mankind, than the Citizen of Pa. or N. Jersey who views with laudable horror, so nefarious a practice….Domestic slavery is the most prominent feature in the aristocratic countenance of the proposed Constitution” (id.). This gift of political power to slave holders was unconstrained. It was perpetual and it would continue to grow as slave masters had every incentive to import and breed as many slaves as they could.

A neutral slavery clause would have apportioned no representation to slaves, an anti-slavery clause would have penalized a state’s representation for each slave.

Since slaves were solely considered property at the time, a state had more representation and more power in the initial government, solely because they possessed more of certain type of property. No other kind of property got this kind of special recognition, so the Constitution enshrined slaves as a sort of special property and slave holders as special property-holders.

The Constitution also gave states great leeway in how they would apportion their congressional districts intrastate, so many states took advantage of this to skew apportionment so that slaveholding regions in the state had more political clout than regions with less slaves. In 1820 in Virginia, the “districts with the highest percentage of slaves averaged only 25,000 free fold compared to an average 37,000 in other districts…” (id. p.97). This made it so not only were there more Congressmen per state than there would have been without the 3/5 compromise, they were also more pro-slavery than were the people themselves because of this factor of interstate apportionment.

Article I section 9—which some peculiarly see as a slavery limiting provision— is also pro-slavery. It protected slavery for a number of years, years in which the South thought it could build up enough white population and increase their slave population to prohibit any constitutional amendment banning slavery or perhaps even any congressional limitations on slavery.

Going back to the 3/5 clause. This not only influenced the make up of Congress, it directly influenced the presidency, because the electoral college is built upon congressional representation. Presidents nominate Supreme Court justices, and so even the Judicial Branch was directly effected by the pro-slavery 3/5 clause. With this is mind, it’s not so difficult to understand how a person such as Roger Taney could ever have made it into the position of Chief Justice and so ably misread the Constitution in his infamous Dred Scott opinion.

Consider some of the other real-life effects this clause had: “For thirty-two of the presidency’s first thirty-six years, a (slaveholding, plantation-owning) Virginian would occupy the nation’s highest office” (Id. p.158). One historian’s tally says “no prominent antislavery leader was appointed to high federal [executive] office before Lincoln’s administration…no southerner was too extreme in his proslavery views to be ineligible for such an honor” (id.). Also interesting is that John Adams would almost assuredly have been elected for a second term if Jefferson had not been benefited by the extra representation in southern states afforded by the 3/5 clause. Finally, although no state legislatures had granted the 3/5 bonus for apportionment purposes prior to 1787, by 1840, several Southern states had. Since the state legislatures chose senators, the 3/5 factor came to directly influence the makeup of all branches and divisions of US government.

So, rather than ensure the eventual ending of slavery, I think the founders who signed the Constitution perpetuated and incentivized it. I don’t know if would have been possible for them to have done otherwise and still form the United States, so I’m not one to vilify them. Like I said I still revere them, and I find it fully acceptable to see them both as great men and fallible men.

Most importantly, the people of the United States eventually fixed these things—though at tremendous cost—so there’s a happy end to the story. And I for one am glad we amend our Constitution the way we do, putting the new text at the end rather than modifying the original text. I think its good to stare at the 3/5 clause, Article I section 9, and Article II section 1 and then go take a good long look at the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. That can be a powerful experience, and one I hope we all do from time to time.

I’m tempted to borrow some ideas for a reply to DN, but that would take time I don’t have this month.

Point taken. Perhaps I didn’t explain enough that my reference was to the government’s involvement in social services (see the heading of that section), where I believe that the government (at all levels) should not be involved, and has never once been involved as effectively (and morally) as the private sector.

the author conflates all levels of government, lumping them into one “effective” mass.

Then you promptly make the same mistake.

Samuelsen “reject[s] as vicious nonsense the idea that government can’t do anything right”, setting aside the evident fact that governments over-promise, underfund, and ultimately rely on force and theft to accomplish their many commitments.

If you were to be accurate you would have to acknowledge that some governments at various levels do manage to do some things right without over-promising and under-funding. Admittedly that is the exception and not the rule, but it does happen and it’s disingenuous of you to accuse him of generalizing right before you do the same thing.