It has been determined that there is a problem with a system that has been set up by your organization. From what you are told, the system that was established was pretty good, however, there are too many exploits that are being taken advantage of. To top it off, there are serious flaws that cause the system to underperform and not meet the needs of your consumers.
So you put together a team and are told that you need to think up some solutions to the problems you are facing. As a system developer, you know that this team will be top-notch and will involve a lot of effort on your part as well as others. So you pull together as many people as you think necessary. Of course, there are people who believe that nothing is really wrong with that system, so the idea of changing anything is ridiculous. Others are overjoyed to have an opportunity to tweak something they’ve admired.
In any case, your team is put together and your instructions are to fix the flaws in the system. Early on in the process, you find that there are several problems inherent in the system, more so than you first realized. To top it off, many of these are in core of the system, so you are faced with a serious dilemma: do you attempt to patch over the core components or do you scrap the entire thing and create something new and possibly better than the last one.
Systems Engineers, Senior Software Engineers, and just about any other type of engineer or software developer have face this problem. Legacy systems are always going to be outdated after a fashion, but you have to seriously look at the pros and cons of revamping the entire thing or just making sure it won’t break. I face that situation currently at the company I work for where we have a web application built on older framework and we are trying to move forward with newer frameworks available. But it’s a long process.
I am not, however, talking about the software or engineering work. I am talking about something that took place over two centuries ago, namely, the Constitutional Convention. You see, the Founding Fathers were not sent there to completely rewrite a new system of government, they were originally suppose to fix some of the glaring problems with the Articles of Confederation. While this was a good idea, the Founders quickly realized that unless there was a drastic overhaul, there wouldn’t much of a Union left. So they instead rewrote the system of government into something they saw as better than what they were operating under.
The Constitution wasn’t a perfect document. They knew that there were inherent problems with it and they closed as many loopholes as they could without completely restricting the business of government. The Federalist Papers were written to this effect where Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison argued that while it isn’t perfect, it was a lot better than the Articles of Confederation. Still, it was quite clear that despite the flaws in the Constitution, they believed in it.
I am wondering though if it isn’t high time that we hold another Constitutional Convention ourselves and push it through the states to ratify it. I am afraid that such a thing might not work out for the best, though, since the radical Left is in the mainstream of our culture. We may end up with kooks demanding that health care, food, or shelter be made a right where as actual property ownership will be discarded as a privilege (as it pretty much is now). Still, though, I can dream of something like that happening in order to better refine our system of government.