Resolved: The US founding fathers were Socialist

A few final points:1. Con tried to change the rules at the end of the gameIn Round 1, I clarified that the "Founding Fathers" mentioned in the resolution would refer specifically to "the individuals who actually drafted the Constitution," and that the views of individuals who were not at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia would be irrelevant. My opponent agreed to this clarification, and subsequently posted the names of the 55 delegates who attended the Philadelphia Convention to begin his argument in Round 2.After I shot down his Round 4 argument about state constitutions as irrelevant, however, my opponent attempted to re-define "Founding Fathers" as "those who established the Government," including the state constitutions. This is a silly attempt at moving the goal posts as I approach the endzone; he cannot change one of the fundamental terms of a debate after he already agreed to it for 4 Rounds.2. The Necessary & Proper Clause delegates broad implied powers to the federal governmentCiting to one online dictionary, my opponent argues that the word "necessary" means "absolutely essential," so that the Necessary & Proper Clause limits Congress to only passing laws which "are absolutely essential" to fulfilling certain enumerated powers. As Alexander Hamilton warned in 1791, however, "[i]t is essential to the being of the national government, that so erroneous a conception of the meaning of the word necessary should be exploded." [1] In an argument which later convinced President George Washington and a unanimous First Senate to create the first national bank, Hamilton wrote:"It is certain that neither the grammatical nor popular sense of the term requires that construction. According to both, necessary often means no more than needful, requisite, incidental, useful, or conducive to. It is a common mode of expression to say, that it is necessary for a government or a person to do this or that thing, when nothing more is intended or understood, than that the interests of the government or person require, or will be promoted by, the doing of this or that thing. The imagination can be at no loss for exemplifications of the use of the word in this sense. And it is the true one in which it is to be understood as used in the Constitution. The whole turn of the clause containing it indicates, that it was the intent of the Convention, by that clause, to give a liberal latitude to the exercise of the specified powers." [2]As a further argument against the existence of implied constitutional powers, however, my opponent cited the 10th Amendment, which states:"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." [3] One word is conspicuously missing from the 10th Amendment: expressly. Compare the language in the 10th Amendment with a corresponding provision from the Articles of Confederation, Article II:"Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled." [4] By comparing these two provisions, it is clear that the 10th Amendment is merely a watered-down version of the provision it replaced from the Articles of Confederation. By omitting the word "expressly" from the 10th Amendment, the Founding Fathers were deliberately accepting the existence of implicitly delegated powers through the Necessary and Proper Clause. Chief Justice John Marshall explained as such for a unanimous Supreme Court in the 1819 case Maryland v. McCulloch, which upheld the Second Bank of the United States as a valid manifestation of Congress' implied powers through the Necessary and Proper Clause. [5]3. My opponent failed to address his own contradiction on implied powers & the Takings ClauseIn Round 4, I challenged my opponent to identify the source of the federal government's power to exercise eminent domain. Obviously it must have the power, or else the 5th Amendment's requirement that the federal government pay "just compensation" to former property owners wouldn't make any sense. Remember that the Bill of Rights (including the 5th Amendment) originally only applied to the federal government. [6]In response, my opponent cited Congress' power in Article 1, sec. 8, to "exercise . . . Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be . . . ", but that refers to Congress' power over land purchased from consenting States. This provision fails to address where Congress gets the power to take property directly from individual non-consenting property owners. If Congress didn't have an implied power to exercise eminent domain, where did it get a power that was later restricted by the 5th Amendment? My opponent's failure to adequately address this point speaks volumes.4. Hamilton supported socialist policiesWhen I accepted this debate, I was fully aware of the fact that term "socialism" didn't exist at the time the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution in 1787. I never set out to prove that the Founding Fathers were card-carrying Socialist Party members; I merely tried to prove that a majority of the Founding Fathers supported certain economic and political policies which would classify them as "socialists" by modern-day conservatives or libertarians.Judging his policies through a contemporary political lense, Alexander Hamilton was an unavowed big-government socialist. By describing him as an "Economic Nationalist," my opponent is attempting to mask this inescapable truth.Consider the evidence:1. Hamilton supported the creation of a National Bank through implied powers [1]2. Hamilton supported tarriffs AND industry-specific subsidies [7]3. Hamilton supported a strong centralized government [8]4. Hamilton supported an unlimited interpretation of the government's taxing power [9]5. Hamilton supported a near-unlimited interpretation of the government's spending power [10]Given these policies, it is no wonder that many of Hamilton's modern-day critics call him a "socialist." [11, 12]5. A majority of the Founding Fathers shared Hamilton's viewsAs I have shown throughout this debate, the majority of the delegates who actually attended the Constitutional Convention supported Hamilton's political views. That is why, for example, he successfully convinced President Washington and the First Congress to create the first National Bank and enact almost all of his economic policies, over the objections of minority dissenters like Jefferson and Madison. This is also why his expansive views on the Necessary & Proper Clause and General Welfare Clause carried the argument in the early Federalist-dominated Supreme Court.In other words, this is why the Founders were socialists.Sources:[1] http://www.constitution.org...[2] Id.[3] http://www.usconstitution.net...[4] http://avalon.law.yale.edu...[5] Maryland v. McCulloch, 17 U.S. 316 (1819)[6] http://en.wikipedia.org...[7] http://www.archive.org...;(advocating for government subsidies to coal, raw wool, sail cloth, cotton, and glass manufacturers)[8] http://www.constitution.org...;(criticizing federalism by concluding that history "emphatically illustrates the tendency of federal bodies rather to anarchy among the members, than to tyranny in the head")[9] http://www.constitution.org...;("[T]here ought to be no limitation of a power destined to effect a purpose which is itself incapable of limitation.")[10] http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu...[11] http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com...[12] http://mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com...