Last week I observed that the redrafted relationship between states and the national government under the then-proposed Constitution was not a constant-sum (or zero-sum) game in which states lost whatever the national government gained. By solving coordination and cooperation failures between the states, the creation of a more centralized, powerful national government in those areas of interstate failure, actually effectuated state-level policy goals.
So, too, anti-Federalists uniformly styled the creation of the national government under the Constitution as a threat to liberty (relative to the Articles of Confederation). While that was certainly possible, and the Anti-Federalists had a legitimate concern, their critique misses an important feature of the story.
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