The Pros And Cons Of Federalism

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When the United States won freedom from Great Britain after the American Revolution they adopted the Articles of Confederation. Twenty-one years the United States was ruled by the Articles until they adopted the U.S. Constitution in 1787. This made it so that the nation was rules by a sovereign national government, but also the states were sovereign as well. Some advantages that this system has over a strong national government in a highly centralized system is that it encourages competition between the states, as well as it gives sovereignty to the states to run themselves how they best see fit. Some disadvantages of the current system in the United States are that due to federal funding of state budgets if the role of national government was more limited it would have a drastic economic effect on the state. Also due to the aggressive nature of many federal programs the states cannot effectively run these programs themselves and depend on federal support. …show more content…
After twenty-one years the United States rewrote their laws, and called it the U.S. Constitution. Under this set of laws the national government was sovereign but still getting its power from the people, and the states were sovereign as well and got their power from the people. Under the U.S. Constitution many different forms of federalism came and went, evolving to where the country is today, which is a marble-cake system of federalism. Marble-cake federalism is the cooperation between different levels of government, whether national, state, or local (Champagne Harpham