I may be misremembering, but I believe the way things were originally designed was that the Senate was supposed to represent the states, not the people. The house represented the people. That's why the Senate has equal representation (because the states were meant to have equal say), and the house proportionate to population.
They came up with the best thing they could agree on at the time. They did not intend on it to become sacred, untouchable, and without the ability to change with the times, and sometimes we have changed it. Just not quite enough times.
We pay more in taxes than the welfare states, have less representation... Seems like there was something in US History about taxation without representation.
It would be somewhat OK if the House was much more powerful relative to the Senate, similar to how the (unelected) Canadian Senate rarely if ever opposes the will of the House.
Land doesn't vote, but groups do. The Constitution was written to accommodate both points, the Senate so each state has an equal vote, which is fair in respect to the fact that the Constitution is and agreement between states, and Congress where states with more people get more votes, because that is a legitimate perspective as well. It's not perfect to start with, and it's been modified poorly over time (representation hasn't been kept proportional in Congress), but it is fair to say that each state having an equal vote is one valid point of view, and the founders realized that it wasn't the only valid point of view.
Don't attribute the 'states rights' phrase to me as though I'm on the wrong side of the civil war or something. The country can't be entirely directed by states regardless of population, but the states can't be directed by other states based solely on population either.
We have the technology to implement some direct democracy and get away from all this "represntitive democracy" that doesnt work so well. Let people vote on the actual issues and we'll get progressive policies pretty quickly, we wont get into wars, we'll spend much less on defense, and the corporatists wont be able to buy influence as easily.
While they benefited from it later at this point Virginia was a population powerhouse, the actual states pushing for this were the small New England states, I think some of them only gave up their giant western claims(google 'long connecticut') in exchange for it.
It was also a compromise. Proto-Federalists wanted a direct democracy determined by population, Proto-Democratic-Republicans wanted each state to get one vote. In the end they split the difference, House was determined by population, Senate by states, and the president by a hybrid system that didn't fully give either what they wanted.
If you went back in time to stop the electoral college you could just as easily get a 'One vote per state for president, 26 votes wins' system instead of a direct democracy.
To be fair, it is the united ´states´, not the united ´people living on the continent´. It wouldn’t be any more fair if California was making the decisions for 20 other states, just because they happen to have a crap load of people. The federal government is kind of supposed to be making decisions and maintaining things between states, not all these decisions affecting the people so directly.