I’m going to assume that you meant that there would be “no reason to think that we’d not end up with an entirely different constitution when it was over”, because what you wrote doesn’t make sense with the rest of what you wrote.

The values they shared were values of individual liberty and small government. Does anyone truly believe that we’d be lucky enough to have delegates to a 2013 Convention, say, that were anywhere near the intellectual and moral calibre of Madison, or Mason, or Franklin ? Yea, I didn’t think so.

Could you perhaps explain what you mean when you say that “the values they shared were values of individual liberty and small government”? In my opinion, the Founders were [almost exclusively] a bunch of wealthy lawyers and merchants who created a powerful central government so that they and their friends could benefit from it to a greater extent than they were benefiting from the US government under the Articles of Confederation (it certainly didn’t do the small farmers, slaves, women, landless white males, immigrants, Indians, and non-Protestant Christians and non-Christians any good). The use of the word “founders” can be applied in the same way to the broader group of politicians of the thirteen states who were responsible for the ratification and implementation of the new government. The Founders, less and more broadly, were just as politically-motivated as the politicians of today are. Was the government that they created better than many that existed at the time? Certainly, but only because it wasn’t designed to deal with many of the issues that the states were already dealing with (like the problem of people not believing in the religion that the politicians wanted them to believe in). If they thought that they could have convinced a majority of the state politicians to vote in favor of a constitution that granted the federal government even more power at even greater expense to the states (or one that completely did away with the state governments altogether), I have little doubt that they would have. For all of their posturing about individual liberty and limited government during the debate about what powers to give the new federal government and about why the Constitution should have been ratified, the Founders (both those directly involved in the Constitution’s creation and those involved in its ratification) certainly showed no compunction over limiting individual liberty, increasing the size and scope of the new government once they had what they wanted, and using the new government as their personal fiefdom. The state governments were as oppressive as ever and the new government started to grow through fear and lies almost from the very beginning.

The government that they created wasn’t, in my opinion, ever intended to provide for individual liberty while retaining a small government. An honest look at the Constitution as originally-written clearly shows that it was written for commercial reasons. An honest look at the constitutions of many of the states clearly shows that many of the states were not at all interested in individual liberty (go to the Avalon Project and read the original constitutions of the thirteen states and then try to argue that they were designed to promote individual liberty and then try to argue that the US Constitution, as originally-written, was designed to counteract the many oppressive policies of many states).

Would anything that came out of a modern Constitutional Convention be as good as the constitution that we have now? Well, that depends on whether or not you believe what we have is a good constitution; on whether you believe that the Founders were somewhat-flawed demigods or power-hungry politicians intent on securing for themselves and their friends profits at the expense of the many; on whether you believe that the subsequent history of the US, and thus the world, happened despite the Constitution or because of it. Frankly, the more I learn of that particular time period and of American and world history in general, the more I come to believe that there are some very, to put it lightly, serious flaws in the way that libertarians tend to think about the Founders and the Constitution.

We here at TLP are certainly no fans of the two-party plutocracy. But as libertarians, we see significant danger opening a Convention, as the forces dominating the debate are likely to be populist or socialist (social democrat in the Euro sense, I’m sure), and will not properly restrain the powers of government.

The structure we have today is merely a shadow of what was intended at the founding of America, but even that shadow is likely to be better than what might come out of this convention.