BAD SIGNS FOR LIBERTY
Limited, constitutional government seems to be an illusion
BY JOE SOBRAN

These are discouraging days for anyone who believes in liberty. At least so it seems to me. I can only hope I’m missing some hopeful signs. 

I do notice bad signs like the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent 5-to-4 ruling in Kelo v. City of New London, which turned the “takings” clause of the Fifth Amendment on its head by holding that the government may claim your property for anything it chooses to call “public use,” even if that means turning it over to a private business it thinks will pay more in taxes than you do. This decision has produced more outrage than anything the Court has done in many years, which is some consolation. 

The recent Gulf Coast hurricanes have provoked hysterical demands that the Federal Government take full responsibility for natural disasters, even to the extent of rebuilding whole cities below sea level, thereby inviting a recurrence of foreseeable disasters. President Bush has pledged to spend whatever it takes, never mind constitutional restraints. Or common sense. 

Bush himself has been a disaster for liberty. After eight years of Bill Clinton, he appeared to stand for a return to limited government, in both foreign and domestic policy. Instead he has given us a huge and needless war, a huge new bureaucracy in the Department of Homeland Security, new violations of liberty in the Patriot Acts, and new levels of Federal spending that have shocked even Democrats. 

Writing in Freedom Daily, Sheldon Richman reminds us of Murray Rothbard’s insight “that every principle devised to limit the power of government sooner or later becomes a way to expand it.” This can only bring a blush to the cheek of anyone who has ever called for “a return to limited government,” as I’ve spent most of my own writing career doing. My own blushes run to a very deep crimson when I reflect that I myself hoped Bush might achieve this. 

It’s not that Bush himself is a particularly bad man; neither was Bill Clinton, despite his corruption. It’s that the whole idea of “limited, constitutional government” seems to be an illusion. 

At the same time, some governments are worse than others, and I’m truly grateful to be living in this country rather than in, say, North Korea. But it’s not quite as easy as I used to think to explain why, even to myself. I start with the simple fact that this government isn’t starving us to death. 

Bad as it is in many ways, the American state is still inhibited by the moral habits and legal traditions of Christian civilization. There are some things we can usually be sure our rulers won’t even try to do to us, though the old restraints are weakening alarmingly and the law is increasingly the plaything of the strong. It’s another bad sign that the decay of law is called “progress” and “democracy.” 

In a sense, of course, government — the power of the strong — should be limited; the individual should be able to defend himself against it. But government will never control its own power, and we only confuse ourselves by talking as if it would or could. We can only try to divide its power, keep it as local as possible, and prevent its consolidation in a single center. 

The Articles of Confederation actually achieved this better than the U.S. Constitution, contrary to everything we are taught about how the Constitution improved the old system, creating “a more perfect union.” In time the Constitution made a monopoly of power possible — the very sort of “consolidated” government everyone professed to oppose at the time it was adopted. 

The victory of the North over the South was actually the victory of the Union over the “free and independent states” affirmed in the Declaration of Independence and reaffirmed in the Articles; it denied the right of the states to secede under any circumstances whatever. After the Union victory, the Constitution was changed to weaken the states further, especially by the Fourteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Amendments. More recently we’ve seen the evisceration of the Second, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments, and lately, in the Kelo case, the Fifth. 

What some call the advance of “progress” and “democracy” is really the long, sad story of the increase of the government’s power over us. It has happened in other ways in other countries, but this, in brief outline, is how it has happened — and how it’s continuing, day by day — in “the land of the free.”

Joe Sobran is an author, syndicated columnist and editor of a monthly newsletter, SOBRAN’S. See www.sobran.com for more information or. To contact Joe, write to joseph@sobran.com.