re: #15 calochortus

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.

The Articles were a mess because a rump federal government can’t unite a damned thing. And when the states each have their own ambitions and reasons to avoid working together with others, you get a “nation” that is little better than herding cats.