Advocates of liberty are frequently confronted with the following fallback position of their intellectual adversaries: We live in a representative democracy. If you don’t like what is taking place, your beef is with the people who have freely chosen their representatives.

That argument is intended to blunt criticism of activist government. If the people have freely chosen it, who are you to complain?

There are several problems with that argument. First, the United States was supposed to be a constitutional republic, not a democracy. A constitution is intended to limit the people’s power to use the government to achieve their ends. As the framers saw it, the delegation of enumerated powers to the Congress means that, barring amendment, that’s all the Congress can do—no matter how badly “the people” want something else done. Unfortunately, the delegated powers have been stretched beyond recognition to permit Congress to define its own powers.

Appealing to the representative nature of the government has further problems. If those representatives and the bureaucrats they empower deliberately shroud their activities so that citizens find it virtually impossible to monitor the government, how representative is it really? Someone of statist mindset might invoke the division of labor: Citizens, the argument might go, delegate decision-making power to specialists in public policy by electing the president and members of the legislature. That’s what the civics textbooks say, at any rate. But the real world doesn’t quite conform.

The latest evidence comes in a startling confession by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In June Moynihan wrote about Social Security in the New York Times. To provide some context, he turned back to 1977, when Congress changed the method for financing the program. “In 1977,” he wrote, “Social Security, the retirement program, was changed from a pay-as-you-go system to a partially funded system.” To accomplish this the government hiked the payroll tax two points. Now instead of having only the amount required to pay the retirees, the system had a surplus with which to build a reserve fund. It wasn’t a real reserve fund, because the government spent the money. But Social Security got IOU’s, which someday the government will pay—by raising taxes or borrowing.

What’s relevant about that legislative history is this comment from Moynihan: “No one noticed this [change]. I was a member of the 1977 House-Senate Conference Committee that enacted the law, and I surely didn’t notice. Nor was it reported.”

Bear in mind that Moynihan is considered one of the most intelligent and conscientious members of Congress. (He’s George Will’s favorite senator.) But he didn’t notice the change! Moreover, it was not reported, meaning the public wasn’t informed. (So much for the crack Washington press corps.)

The lesson: We have a government that essentially defines its own powers and in which its officials—much less the people—often don’t know what’s going on. Time to rewrite the civics texts.

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Odd things can happen when public property turns into private property. For example, it can become more accessible to the public than when it was “public.” John Blundell resolves the paradox.

The essence of the freedom philosophy is that without private property there is no liberty. Even the seemingly propertyless, writes James Bovard, are protected by this depreciated institution.

Nearly every economist who has studied the matter closely agrees that the Food and Drug Administration harms consumers and should be eliminated sooner or later. Daniel Klein elaborates the reasons for this remarkable unanimity.

Trade with China may accelerate economic and political liberalization there. Then again, it may not. Nevertheless, the barriers should come down, writes Christopher Lingle.

The Founding Fathers, as admirable as they are, sometimes get too much credit. After all, Thomas Woods says, they were heirs to a uniquely formative colonial experience.

New Zealand’s bold venture in voluntary unionism, alas, has come to an end. Charles Baird writes the not-quite-an-obituary.

Last year Richard Timberlake wrote a three-part series in these pages on the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies before and during the Great Depression. Then Joseph Salerno critiqued Timberlake’s thesis from the framework of Austrian economics. In a final go-around, Timberlake and Salerno rebut each other and argue for their respective positions.

Here’s what our columnists have come up with this month: Donald Boudreaux makes the case for true self-government. Lawrence Reed draws attention to continuing farm socialism. Doug Bandow assays the implications of Medicare’s expansion into prescription medicines. Thomas Szasz wonders why anyone’s amazed that some pharmacies don’t stock certain painkillers. Dwight Lee applies marginal analysis to labor. Mark Skousen warns: beware easy money. Russell Roberts isn’t convinced that campaign finance control will set us free. And Karen Palasek, hearing arguments for government to address a wage gap detrimental to women with children, responds, “It Just Ain’t So!”

This month’s book reviewers size up volumes on private education initiatives around the world, the bloody twentieth century, the cost of eliminating the welfare state, property, false knowledge, and James Madison.

—Sheldon Richman