Originally Posted by Billybob

Not having any idea as to the extent of your present interest or your past experience or education the best thing you could do is read the Federalist Papers. These are the collection of essays contemporaneously written by some of the incredible thinkers and contributors to the US Constitution; Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay as they made their case for ratification to the people of NewYork State, published in 1787-1788.

The vision of the founding fathers was the minimum government and the maximum freedom and liberty of individuals, groups of people as states would be the laboratories where the balance between governance and liberty would be examined. The founding fathers fundamentally understood that individuals instinctively act in their own self interest and the differences in the ways and degrees that states responded to that intrinsic force would determine what balance would be the most successful. States that responded with oppressive interference with individual liberty would not prosper and loose inhabitants and states that responded with negligent intervention would have chaos and the same loss of inhabitants, because the US Constitution prevented government from interfering with people moving to find circumstances that better suited their interests.
States that balanced governance and liberty which allowed the maximum life liberty and the pursuit of their inhabitants happiness would attract people who where not satisfied elsewhere.

The beauty of this logic is that ultimately the collective decisions of all Americans acting in their own best interests was viewed as superior to any higher political authority deciding.

Many people find reading the Federalist Papers and the ideas and ideally articulated within as very close to there own personal feelings rather than the threads of political discourse of their own day and time.