Like all historians and those who have studied the brief period between the end of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the Constitution, chaos was total. This chaos can be attributed to the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation were like the law book of the United States of America. The articles were, however, very weak. They were to be replaced by a much better entity which we now know was the Constitution of the United States. The Articles of Confederation had to be replaced due to their inability to control trade, their inability to tax, and the disunity of their decision-making process. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The greatest weakness of the Articles of Confederation was their inability to control intrastate, international, and interstate commerce. Trade is probably the most important thing for a country's survival. Control of trade is essential to the survival of a country. The Articles of Confederation could not do that. How could the country survive? The federal government could say ban all products from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, but the states, usually the New England state of Rhode Island, could say no and the items could not nothing to do about it. This also applied to interstate commerce. If a ship crossed too far across the Potomac River or Delaware River, you could be taxed for entering another state. It was a horrible system in which states competed with each other for dominance and to get out of debt by harming each other's economies with tariffs and taxes. In reality, the inability to control commerce within and outside the nation made the Articles of Confederation a bad system that needed to be replaced. Another reason why the Articles of Confederation was a truly horrible system was its inability to tax the country's population. The United States of America. The Articles of Confederation could not impose on the people or the states. They could only ask for donations and only about twenty-five percent of their requests were met, meaning they only got about twenty-five percent of what they needed. It was a horrible system since they couldn't continue. We were in debt in particular to France, but also to other countries. Since we only made about twenty-five percent of what we needed, we couldn't even pay the interest on the loan, which was horrible. We were sinking deeper and deeper into debt and France got angry and blocked its ports in the West Indies from us, crippling our economy even more than it already was due to the Empire's treatment Spanish and especially the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Clearly, the failure of the Articles of Confederation to tax destroyed the nation and continued to make it worse. Finally, another important reason why the Articles of Confederation needed to be replaced was their decision-making. First, the way the Congress was organized. Each state had one vote. It would be nice if all states were the same size, but that's not the case. In this form of government, the six hundred and eighty thousand inhabitants of Virginia had the same power as the sixty-eight thousand inhabitants of Rhode Island. It's just unfair to all these people. Virginia and New York had the same amount of electricity.