1. Why is the United States Constitution stronger than the Articles of Confederation? How would the history of the United States have been different if the country still operated under the Articles?
The United States Constitution is by far stronger than the Articles of Confederation primarily due to the fact that it creates a strong but not overbearing national federal government, while also giving some power to the states legislatures to still be able to create many laws in which it could in many ways govern its population. The Constitution also united the states, giving them a power that they individually could not have had under the Articles of Confederation, which gave the states far too much power over a weak central government. They did not have to pay revenues to Congress, and Congress did not have any actual power to tax citizens themselves, in which the nation’s debt wasn’t being paid. As well, under the Articles of Confederation the states had different taxes on imports and exports from the other states, which hurt the nation’s overall economic growth. Even worse still was the fact that there was no strong central government, only state maintained small armies or militias, which proved to be incompetent when the Spanish blocked off commercial access to the Mississippi River. With the Constitution in place, the national government would be able to regulate such things in a relatively smooth manner, giving the states a strong structure to work off of and to be more focused on what happens within the state itself. The country would be extremely different, with the states trying to regulate the commerce in and out of its state with more states (as the nation naturally expanded), leading to a possibly weak economy all around. Or the United States, with its weak and sporadic state armies, may have fallen to another, more powerful country. In all honesty, the differences without the Constitution would be too numerous name.
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