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VAuroch comments on On saving the world - Less Wrong
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I've always taken the framing of the US Constitution as a cautionary tale about the importance of getting things exactly right. The founding fathers were highly intelligent (some of them, anyway), well-read and fastidious; after a careful review of numerous different contemporary and historical government systems, from the Iriquois confederacy to ancient Greek city-states, they devised a very clever, highly non-obvious alternative designed to be watertight against any loopholes they could think of, including being self-modifying in carefully regulated ways.
It almost worked. They created a system that came very, very close to preventing dictatorship and oligarchy... and the United States today is a grim testament to what happens when you cleverly construct an optimization engine that almost works.
One of the things that is impressive about the Constitution is that it was designed to last a few decades and then reset in a new Constitutional Convention when it got too far from optimal. It's gone far beyond spec at this point, and works.. relatively well.
Source?
The source I took this from? My highschool History and Government teacher. Actual source to prove it? Can't find a solid one, though Jefferson certainly endorsed this position (blogpost goes into some detail into one of his letters). Jefferson was extremely suspicious of central government in general (he was the leader of the Republican/states-first faction at the time, as opposed to the Federalist/country-first faction), so I'm not sure how much of the rest would agree.
Looking into it further, here's the letter from Jefferson to Madison, and here is Madison's reply. Summary: Nah, 19 years is too short, we're writing law for the "yet unborn" as well as the living. Madison was at the other extreme, obviously; he was one of the most Federalist (though probably not the most; I'd give that spot to Adams).
However, the fact that there is a section of the calling of a Constitutional Convention indicates that they expected it to be used. I have no proof, but I'd be willing to bet that Madison, Jefferson, and anyone in between would be very surprised that that provision has never been used in 230 years.
Not the most trustworthy source.
He was a damn good teacher, to be fair. And this was in one of the areas he taught an elective of his own design, so it was something he had studied in more depth than you'd expect.