On Jambo's post...

Perhaps Jambo has touched on something...

How much of the "75%" of authority that the Fed has managed to assume outside of it's enumerated powers is the Fed (over the last 200 years, say) trying to fix what the States initially failed to accomplish on their own?

For example, the national bank was a failure from word GO... and no rational (or irrational) attempt to fix it ever worked, until the institution of the Federal Reserve, which vaulted the US Dollar into its place as "the" global currency. The national bank was intended to provide for a means of regulation and uniformity that the individual States could not provide through their individual scripts. No one would argue that the Federal Reserve is a part of the Federal Government's enumerated powers... but who could argue that the States could do a better job without it?

I guess my point is that much of the "great American experiment" that is the US of A has been a trial-and-error effort since it began in 1789... and not every error was fixed by a Constitutional amendment, was it? Some of it was simply assumed by the various powers... for right or wrong, wasn't it? Could this be the root of the problems we are discussing and debating so much today?