re: #9 Sol Berdinowitz

These guys long for an age which never existed, one in which we all lived as self-sustaining, self-sufficient settlers on a piece of pristine wilderness we carved out and tamed with our bare hands…with only minimal help from the Federal army in driving off those pesky natives.

Of course they do, but those hardy pioneers were not the ones inventing the telephone, paving the streets or developing a banking system and laws regulating it that made industrialization possible.
Even the founders figured out that the Articles of Confederation allowed too much individual action on the part of the states to work well.