The Federalist Papers (1787-1789): Federalist Essays No.18 - No.22

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In the first place, the system of requisitions and quotas was not only an ineffective means to provide for the needs of the central government, but it was also flawed in theory. As there is no effective means to place actual worth on the value of a state, there can be no fair way to requisition either taxes or troops from individual states. Taxes should be applied directly on the people themselves, as this is a more just way to determine the appropriate amount of taxation. Publius indicates that if there had been an effective means to collect taxes, the union would have certainly been destroyed because of state protests against shouldering the larger burden of taxation.

The method of determining representation at the Confederation Congress was also flawed in that the representatives did not truly represent the population. Each state, no matter how large the population, received the same suffrage in Congress. And, even though a state may send extra delegates to Congress, they all must vote with one voice or not have their voice counted at all. While this certainly contributed to tensions between the delegates of the same state, it also left many citizens without representation. Some states had a much larger population than others, yet this population had the same amount of representation in Congress as a state with a smaller population. This form of representation can never pretend to be representative government. It more resembles a meeting of separate nations.

The other theoretical problem with the system of representation and law making in congress was the probability that a minority of the people could dictate to the majority. For example, in the case of foreign affairs, in which 9 of 13 states must agree in order to enact policy with a foreign nation, if the 4 largest states disagreed, then the minority of the population would have acted against the will of the majority.

Furthermore, take a case in which additions are to be made to the powers of Congress. Under these circumstances, all 13 states must agree to the addition. This is terribly inefficient and unfair, as the states must wait around attempting to persuade a single state that might stand in the way of all the other states acting in accordance with the common good. Such circumstances often arose under the Articles of Confederation, most significantly when Rhode Island refused to agree to an amendment to the Articles that would allow Congress to levy imposts on trade.

The authors of The Federalist also emphasize the illegitimate process of ratification used for the Articles of Confederation and question the validity of the document. The authority to establish a new government is theoretically supposed to rest with the people. However, the people did not approve of the Articles, the state governments did. The authority of government does not rest with the power of the state governments, but with the power of the people and there are many grounds on which the Articles violated that principle.