This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 17th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

On this Constitution day, it's worth remembering those who didn't much care for the Constitution

and how prescient they were about the growth of the federal government.

Trevor Burris, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, talks about the anti-Federalederalists who helped shape the Constitution and the country.

Winners write the history, so why do we care who the anti-federalists are?

Why does that matter?

Well one of the worst ways to do history is, of course, to believe that the history

we know was inevitable.

It was foreordained.

And there's a lot of amazing things about the Constitution, but there were people who opposed

it.

And we call them the anti-Federalists now, somewhat of a misnomer, but again winners also

named their opponents, they're anti-something, they're anti-federalism.

But they were the people who thought that we didn't need a really powerful centralized government sitting remotely in Washington, D.C.

Although it wasn't Washington, D.C. at the time, some federal city that was going to take over the internal management of Rhode Island or

Vermont or any of those states, well actually not Vermont, it wasn't a colony yet,

but any of the other states that we didn't need that.

And the best way of thinking about this, of putting yourself sort of back in 1787,

is to think about the European Union now.

If you live in Luxembourg and they come along and say, hey Brussels should really have power over health care decisions, the EU generally.

In Luxembourg you're like, we don't need that. We do well on our own. we have our own welfare state, and if we give Brussels power over Luxembourg,

...