GOVERNMENT CANNOT BE RESTRAINED I have gotten this question: what constitutional amendment would you favor to enact the Misesian agenda. Would you want one that forbids taxes from being raised above a certain amount, or enacts free trade, or guarantees the freedom of contract? My answer is that if I were to wish for amendments, they would look very much like the Bill of Rights. Major swaths of that document are ignored now. Why should we believe that a new amendment is going to perform any better? The problem with amendments is that they presume a government large enough and powerful enough to enforce them, and a government that is interested more in the common good than its own good. After all, a tendency we’ve seen over 200 years is for the whole of the Constitution to be rendered by the courts as a mandate for government to intervene, not a restriction on its ability to intervene. Why do we believe that our pet amendment would be treated any differently? What we need is not more things for government to do, but fewer and fewer until the point where genuine liberty can thrive. Speaking of the Constitution, the grounds on which it was approved were not that it would create the conditions of liberty, but it was rather that it would restrain government in its unrelenting tendency to take away the people’s liberties. Its benefit was purely negative: it would restrain the state. The positive good it would do would consist entirely in letting society thrive and grow and develop on its own. In short, the Constitution did not impose American liberty, contrary to what children are taught today. Instead, it permitted the liberty that already existed to continue to exist and even be more secure against despotic encroachments. Somehow this point has been lost on the current generation, and, as a result, we are learning all the wrong lessons from our founding and other history. If we come to believe that the Constitution gave us liberty, we become very confused by the role of the United States in the history of the world. Too many people see the United States as the possessor of the political equivalent of the Midas touch. It can go into any country with its troops and bring American prosperity to them. What is rarely considered an option these days is the old Jeffersonian vision of not imposing liberty but simply permitting liberty to occur and develop from within society itself. As for foreign countries, the record that the United States has in so-called “nation-building” is abysmal. Time after time, the United States enters a country with its troops, handpicks its leaders, sets up its own intrusive agencies, props up structures that people regard as tyrannous, and then we find ourselves in shock and awe when the people complain about it. By the way, I’m old enough to remember a time when Republicans didn’t call critics of nation-building traitors. They called them patriots. If memory serves, that was about 10 years ago. As dreadful as this may sound, it does seem that the US government and American political culture are masking their fears of liberty in the name of imposing it. For truly, most political sectors in the United States have a deep fear of the consequences of just leaving things alone—laissez faire, in the old French phrase. The left tells us that under genuine liberty, children, the aged, and the poor would suffer abuse, neglect, discrimination, and deprivation. The right tells us that people would wallow in the abyss of immorality while foreign foes would overtake us. Economists say that financial collapse would be inevitable, environmentalists warn of a new age of insufferable fire and ice, while public policy experts of all sorts conjure up visions of market failures of every size and shape. We continue to speak about freedom in our rhetoric. Every president and legislator praises the idea and swears fealty to the idea in public statements. But how many today believe this essential postulate of the old liberal revolution, that society can manage itself without central design and direction? Very few. Instead people believe in bureaucracy, central banking, war and sanctions, regulations and dictates, limitations and mandates, crisis management, and any and every means of financing all of this through taxes and debt and the printing press. Rockwell Jr., Llewellyn H. (2010-05-24). The Left, the Right, and the State (pp. 23-25). Ludwig von Mises Institute. Kindle Edition.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 06:05:46 +0000
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