No Coercion

People across the U.S. today are celebrating Constitution Day (including many of my fellow libertarians). Personally, I’m not sure what there is to celebrate. I understand the argument that it was a document that, on its face, set up a somewhat limited government (especially by today’s standards), but that limited government was orders of magnitude more powerful (even on paper) than the previous one set up under the Articles of Confederation. And I understand that Madison and those guys came up with some seemingly very clever checks and balances that probably seemed really cool to people that were used to powerful monarchs, but all those checks and balances were functions of one single government. If the government wants to, there’s nothing to theoretically prevent it from doing whatever it wants. Even allowing voters the occasional choice of rulers is a largely meaningless check since nothing can be done between elections, and the majority of voters almost always vote for the candidate who promises them the biggest chunk of their neighbors’ money or the biggest expansion of government’s ability to make their neighbors behave the way they want.

The U.S. Constitution specifically gives the federal government 18 enumerated powers. To make matters worse, it contains vague language, like the Commerce Clause, the General Welfare Clause, and the Necessary and Proper Clause, which have made it frighteningly easy for the government to continually interpret new powers into existence for itself. In fact, the only way the Federalists were even able to get the Constitution ratified was by including the Bill of Rights, which placed specific limits on government power. But even these, as we have seen over and over in our history, can be ignored with great impunity by Presidents and Congresses with a mind to do so.

Ah, you say, but we have the Supreme Court to check the other branches and make sure they don’t violate the Constitution. That’s a nice theory, but that’s not what usually happens. Who appoints the Supreme Court justices? The Executive, with Senate confirmation. There’s no inherent reason for one branch to fear (as Madison hoped) a growth in power by another branch and thus act to stop it. In fact, each branch has the most to gain if it can help the other branches gain more power. And this is exactly what we have seen in reality as each branch has grown ever more powerful and placed ever more severe limits on the ability of individuals to act and interact freely. And the propaganda that has been built up around the Constitution has most Americans mindlessly repeating quaint platitudes about “a blueprint for limited government” and “the Articles of Confederation just didn’t create a strong enough central government to hold the union together” (as if that should ever have been considered a legitimate end in the first place).

So the reality appears to be that the Constitution has had the perverse effect of advancing and legitimizing a perpetually expanding government while convincing the majority of people that it’s supposed to do the opposite.

No, I don’t believe I’ll be celebrating Constitution Day. But I certainly will tip my hat to the Anti-Federalists and supporters of the Bill of Rights, since they saw the Constitution for what it was.

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