I’m afraid it was an unrealistic hope. You can say many good things about the Founding Fathers, but these gentlemen fell short in one critical way: The Constitution they drafted contains no significant intellectual impediment to the endless growth of government; that is, it does not explain what’s wrong with too much government. If anything, it goes in the opposite direction, inviting politicians to use the federal government to address everything. This invitation stands in the preamble, where after noting government’s obvious jobs—“establish Justice” (a court system), “insure domestic Tranquility” (armed forces to put down riots), “provide for the common defence” (armed forces to take care of foreign invaders)—the drafters added that government’s function was also “to promote the general Welfare.”

This phraseology may not have had much importance in 1787, when communication about national issues was limited. In modern times, however, the mass media turn every human need into a national problem that can be said to affect the general welfare: unemployment, wages and working conditions, medical care, education, food production, science, natural disasters, and so on. Following the lead of the preamble, lawmakers feel justified in using government to address every one. The result is a big and ever-growing government.

What Else Is There?

What’s the way to stop this drift? For the answer, we need to examine the logic that drives governmental growth. The modern argument for government involvement looks like this:

1. Problem X affects the general welfare;

2. Government is the only institution that can address national problems;

3. Therefore, government has to address X.

Notice how the argument depends on statement 2, that government is the only answer. If you accept that assumption, then you are pretty much bound to agree that government has to be involved. Not to agree makes you look cruel and insensitive, unwilling to fix the nation’s problems. And it doesn’t matter how badly government has performed in the past. Those urging more government concede that government is wasteful, often inept, and corrupted by special interests. But that doesn’t affect their position. “We’ve got to do something,” they say. “After all, what else is there?”

Well there is something else, but we often overlook it because it’s not big, imposing, and centralized like government. It’s the millions of independent thinkers and doers who each day strive to make the world around them a better place, working individually, and joining together with friends and neighbors, in groups, churches, associations, and businesses. We can call this problem-solving system the private sector, or civil society, or the voluntary sector.

Although we often don’t stop to realize it, this collection of independent actors is working to address just about every national problem you can think of. Take disaster relief. On this subject standard political logic has taken us to a big-government solution. Hurricanes and earthquakes certainly affect the general welfare; therefore, we say, government must step in. So we end up with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Many agree that this massive bureaucracy is inept and wasteful, but if you suggest closing it down people say, “We have to have it. When disaster strikes, we can’t just sit by and do nothing.” That’s the fallacy of assuming only government can solve problems.

When disaster strikes, the fact is that millions of individuals react in constructive ways. The people immediately affected do much to take care of themselves and their families. Neighbors pitch in to help neighbors. Businesses sell—or donate—needed supplies. Churches send aid and volunteers. Voluntary groups in other regions take up collections and send supplies. Businesses rebuild. Philanthropists support reconstruction projects. This vast multitude of helping hands is a disaster-relief system. The same is true for other problems: education, working conditions, medical care, and so on. The private sector can and does address all of these issues.

Its biggest enemy, the entity standing in the way of this vital, intricate system of private, voluntary action is . . . government! It undermines the private sector in three ways:

1. Resources. Government’s taxation drains wealth from the private sector. Every dollar government puts into its programs comes, directly or indirectly, from individuals, businesses, and groups that would have used their resources to do what the government agencies try to do.

2. Regulations. Government’s rules and regulations are, like taxation, a burden on the private sector. Every minute someone spends filling out a government form is a minute he cannot use to help a neighbor.

3. Motivation. Private action is prompted by the belief that we make a difference. When people assume government is supposed to solve problems, it weakens their motivation to help themselves, and it weakens their inclination to reach out and solve problems in their communities.

In conclusion, if the Founding Fathers had wanted to block the drift toward big government, they should have written a preamble that extolled the virtue of the private sector, perhaps like this:

We the people of the United States of America,

recognizing—

That the general welfare is promoted by individuals, families, neighbors, and societies freely striving to improve the condition of mankind,

And further recognizing—

That government action often counteracts their independent, creative activities;

Do hereby establish a government which shall establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, and provide for the common defence.

That little girl with her bizarre beliefs about the powers and responsibilities of the president is a voting adult now—as are millions whose attitudes about government are at least somewhat like hers. She’s probably now wondering if our new president can fill the impossible role Americans expect of their chief executive.

As Healy demonstrates, the perceived responsibilities and powers of the president of the United States have metastasized dangerously since their original conception at the American founding. The president was meant merely to preside over the execution of the laws of the United States, not to be an all-powerful superhero unconstrained in an endless quest to right all wrongs, foreign and domestic. When President John Adams craved the title of “His Highness,” Congress would have none of it; Pennsylvania Senator William Macley called the notion “base,” “silly,” and even “idolatrous.”

Healy charts the resilience of this constrained vision of presidential power, even after the upheaval and power grabs of the Lincoln era. The accumulation of power and hubris at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue accelerated with the rise to power and prominence of men such as Theodore Roosevelt (who wanted to legislate changes in the English language from the White House and started foreign military adventures without congressional approval) and Woodrow Wilson (who declared that God ordained him to be president and cheered a “spirit of ruthless brutality [in the] fiber of our national life. . . . [E]very man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.”).

From Franklin D. Roosevelt on, all the traditional restrictions on the president’s powers crumbled. We find ourselves in a political world where, as in a 1992 presidential debate, candidates are asked to “make a commitment [to] meet [the] needs” of all Americans. Not a single candidate even raised his brow at the extraconstitutional implications of that request.

This book provides a depressing dissection of modern trends in political power—and in Americans’ conception of that power, which underlies the problem of executive overreach. As Healy notes, that makes any quick fix to the “cult of the presidency” unlikely. But the book also contains touches of delightful nostalgia for an America gone by.

One can’t help admiring such derided “do-nothing” presidents as Warren Harding. He gets sneered at by historians and political science professors for lacking the hubris of power, but he pardoned the peaceful protestors his predecessor Woodrow Wilson tossed in jail. Every American should feel a yearning for a past in which a presidential candidate like William Taft could say bluntly that the president “cannot create good times . . . cannot make the rain to fall, the sun to shine, or the crops to grow;” a world where it took five years after the third assassinated president for Congress to grant the holder of the office his own armed janissaries; a time when presidents before Wilson thought that giving their state of the union addresses in person was demagogic.

Healy rightly notes that Congress is complicit in the failure of the Founding Fathers’ system whereby jealousy of their respective prerogatives was supposed to keep any one branch of government from overpowering the others. Our craven Congress grants vague powers and then complains about how the executive uses them—both in war-making and domestic policy.

If Congress is to blame for giving way, the White House is to blame for pushing. Healy details the many ways in which the recent Bush administration championed a wildly expansive vision of executive power in the wake of 9/11. The administration’s leading scholar of executive omnipotence, John Yoo, formerly of Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel, once said in a public debate that the president might well be able to order the extralegal crushing of a child’s testicles if he had the proper national-security reason for doing so.

Gene Healy has ably cast down the idols of the cult of the presidency. But it remains a limited devotion in a larger cult: that of government itself. That cult’s complications and crises loom even larger than the presidency.

If recent items in The Freeman are any indication, its writers take a rather dim view of the Constitution and the Framers thereof. While I couldn’t agree more regarding the people who wrote our federal compact (with a few exceptions), I must take issue with how the magazine treats the Constitution itself.

Sheldon Richman started what seems to have become a trend in Constitution-bashing with his article regarding the Tenth Amendment and its non-similarity to Article II of the Articles of Confederation, which withheld powers not “expressly delegated” from the Confederation Congress (“The Constitution or Liberty,” January–February). A couple of months later, Joseph Stromberg noted the not-so-honest nature of the delegates to the 1787 Convention that produced the Constitution (“Slick Construction Under the Articles of Confederation,” April). And now, most recently, a book review of Kevin Gutzman’s Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution by J. H. Huebert once again raises the argument that the Constitution written in 1787 was at worst a hoax, and at best useless (May).

The key problem with all the above authors, in my mind, is not their evaluation of the intentions of nationalists like Madison and Hamilton. These men were indeed snakes of the worst sort, with Hamilton being the least dangerous precisely because he never pretended to favor republican government. Rather, the authors misunderstand the notion of originalist jurisprudence. A true originalist jurisprudence looks not to what individual delegates to the Convention wanted, but to what they said when they were asked to explain the fruit of their labor, especially to the state conventions that ratified the Constitution. Only when such explanations fail us should we turn to what was said in Philadelphia, and even that is better than what a single delegate such as Hamilton would have desired.

Why must originalism be understood in this way? In short, because any compact (which is what the Constitution was claimed to be) is only valid insofar as it is not fraudulent. Hence, if Hamilton admitted in the Federalist that the federal government could not do such-and-such, and the New York ratification convention ratified it under that understanding, then that is the meaning, regardless of the language of the Constitution or Hamilton’s particular desires.

It is true, as Huebert says, that ambiguity inheres in any constitution, especially short ones. However, relying on only the “people’s eternal vigilance” obviously works no better, since even with both a written constitution and a population bred to liberty, we have reached a deplorably unfree state. The key is to have both, because a vigilant people can be vigilant of nothing without a universal reference, unless the writers of The Freeman suggest a pure democracy. That universal reference is a written constitution. Likewise, a written constitution is also, by itself, worthless. It is mere paper, after all. However, we can control, to some degree, whether there is a constitution and what it says. We cannot, on the other hand, control whether the population under that constitution is “vigilant.” So let’s not leave out the one element we have control over, lest we abandon all hope to limit government.

—JOSHUA SCOTT
SCOTTJ82@lsus.edu

Sheldon Richman replies:

Mr. Scott raises several provocative issues in his thoughtful letter—alas, too many to respond to here. So I will address them and related matters in a future article. For now, let two quotations suffice:

“[A]ny interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (198)

“[I]f the Constitution demands just compensation for victims of eminent domain, then such victims must receive whatever is actually just, not what the framers thought was just, since the Constitution says to give ‘just compensation’ rather than saying to give ‘whatever we consider just compensation.’ ”—Roderick T. Long, “The Nature of Law,” Part III.

Voting Locally

Donald Boudreaux’s article “I Won’t Vote” (April). . . illustrates one of my main concerns with libertarian thought, e.g. the complete failure to recognize the difference between what local, state, and federal levels of government can and should do. While Mr. Boudreaux’s ideas make some sense for the election of a president or a senator, they make no sense whatsoever for the election of a city councilman or a school board member. In my community, at least, these are frequently decided by a mere handful of votes. In a city-council election, a tally of 100 to 105 votes is not at all uncommon. In such an election, if I were to switch my vote and I could convince two others—say, my wife and an older child—to do likewise, I could completely change the outcome of the election. Mr. Boudreaux pats himself on the back for his attitude toward voting. In local elections, 90 percent, and frequently more, of the voters share his attitude exactly.

One reason, of course, is that for both liberals and libertarians, these elections mean, or should mean in their view, next to nothing. That this should be the case for so-called liberals, who feel that every responsibility should rest ultimately with the federal government, is not surprising. What I find annoying is that although libertarians, in theory, at least, are opposed to that sort of thing, on a practical level they lend it de facto support. Local leaders, elected for the most part by a handful of friends and neighbors, struggle to do what they can to make life as pleasant as possible for those same people, find themselves characterized by libertarians, when they don’t agree with absolutely everything the local leaders do, as “lifestyle Nazis” or something similar. I am perfectly aware that there is a great deal of corruption and downright stupidity in local politics, but I can’t help but feel that such problems would be greatly reduced if fewer people adopted Mr. Boudreaux’s attitude.

. . . Indeed, if we would take a greater interest in our local government, it would be greatly strengthened and there would be a greater demand for the state and federal governments to “play by the rules.” One quote that Mr. Boudreaux chose to highlight, “I implicitly agree—by voting—that the process of selecting people to exercise power over me is legitimate,” indicates that he does not feel he should be subjected to government rules at any level. This indicates a belief that his behavior and thought is, or should be, the standard of right. As I understand his position, Leonard Read felt that this very attitude was the greatest enemy of the free market. . . .

—MERRILL GEE
Salt Lake City, Utah

Donald Boudreaux replies:

I appreciate Mr. Gee’s response to my article. I concede that voting in local elections presents less of a moral problem than does voting in national elections. Local governments aren’t as able to be as oppressive as national governments, if for no reason other than that each of us can more easily move out of any particular local jurisdiction than out of any country.

But I disagree that any practical reasons counsel an individual to vote in a local election. Even in local elections an individual’s vote is extremely unlikely ever to decide an outcome. The analytics of determining the probability of decisiveness of a single vote are quite complex—see chapter four of Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky’s Democracy and Decision for a comprehensive treatment of this issue—but, practically speaking, the probability of one vote deciding the outcome of an election in a small town with, say, 1,000 voters is not meaningfully much higher than is the probability of one vote determining the outcome of a national election with millions of voters.

Unfortunately, this is no longer a hypothetical question. Many Americans who claim to support individual freedom also favor permitting the government to torture suspected terrorists or other purported enemies of the United States.

This controversy is reminiscent of a disagreement between the famous economists F. A. Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) brilliantly restated the classical warnings on Leviathan, showing the similarities in trends between Nazi Germany and Western democracies. Keynes claimed that Hayek had gone too far in his criticism because “dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.”

Many Americans have embraced Keynes’s assumption in the post-9/11 era. They have accepted that a democratic government should be permitted to unleash itself if the rulers promise to do good things. They have ignored or shrugged off the specific methods used because of their confidence that politicians “think and feel rightly.”

President George W. Bush exploited this confidence by invoking American values in response to his critics. Shortly after the Abu Ghraib prison photos were published, Bush brushed aside a question about his personal responsibility by assuring a French interviewer that “America is a great and generous and decent country.” After Amnesty International declared that the United States had become “a leading purveyor and practitioner” of torture, Bush sought to refute the charge by invoking American moral greatness: “The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world.” Much of the American media continued praising Bush as a visionary idealist long after the evidence of grave abuses had surfaced.

Usurping Law

The Bush administration’s invocation of freedom to justify its interrogation policies is premised on the assumption that the U.S. government could never be a threat to Americans’ freedom. The Founding Fathers recognized that individual liberty depends on a “government of laws, not of men.” Unfortunately, the Bush administration decided after 9/11 that the law could not be permitted to impede its war against terrorism.

Justice Department lawyers busied themselves creating legal pretexts for the President to scorn the federal Anti-Torture Act and the Geneva Conventions. A secret 2002 memo written by Justice Department official John Yoo proclaimed that “the President enjoys complete discretion in the exercise of his Commander-in-Chief authority and in conducting operations against hostile forces. . . . [W]e will not read a criminal statute as infringing on the President’s ultimate authority in these areas.” White House counsel Alberto Gonzales publicly declared that Bush had a “commander-in-chief override.” Thus the statute book no longer applied to the nation’s Supreme Leader.

Bush and his defenders continually portray the torture scandal as problems caused by a “few bad apples” or simply the equivalent of college-fraternity hazing. In reality, the abuses ranged from the endless high-volume repetition of a “Meow Mix” cat-food commercial at Guantanamo to tearing out toenails in Afghanistan to compulsory enemas for recalcitrant prisoners to beating people to death in Iraq and kicking them to death outside Kabul to illegally sending detainees to foreign governments to be tortured by proxy and creating a system of “ghost prisoners” worthy of a banana republic. U.S. torture has been confirmed by FBI agents, former U.S. military interrogators, a Department of Defense Inspector General report, and court cases around the globe.

Presidential Supremacy

Yale law professor Jack Balkin wrote, “The President has created a new regime in which he is a law unto himself on issues of prisoner interrogations. He decides whether he has violated the laws, and he decides whether to prosecute the people he in turn urges to break the law.”

After 9/11 the CIA constructed an interrogation program by “consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods,” the New York Times noted last year. The United States had long condemned Soviet, Egyptian, and Saudi torture. But interrogation systems designed to compel victims to sign false confessions provided the model for protecting America in the new millennium. Torture regimes crafted to perpetuate repressive systems suddenly became engines of freedom—at least in the eyes of some Bush supporters.

The Justice Department produced a secret legal opinion in 2005 permitting CIA interrogators to use “combined effects” on detainees, including head slapping, simulated drownings (“waterboarding”), frigid temperatures, manacling people for many hours in stress positions, and blasting them with loud music to ensure sleep deprivation. The New York Times, which published the leaked memo, labeled it an “expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.” The memo signaled that the Bush administration explicitly rejected the definition of torture that had been used by the U.S. government for the previous century.

From the time when the first Abu Ghraib photographs were published, President Bush emphatically denied that the U.S. government ever used or approved of torture. But this past April, ABC News revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney and other top Bush administration officials would sit around a table in the White House and specify the precise extreme interrogation methods that would be used on Muslim detainees. ABC noted: “The high-level discussions about these ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were so detailed . . . some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed—down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.” Thus the number of times each prisoner could be whacked upside the head or almost drowned—or how many hours he could be shackled in a painful position—were decreed by the administration’s top officials. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was among the loudest apologists for Bush power grabs, warned, “History will not judge this kindly.” Bush later confirmed that he was aware that his top officials were dictating exactly how brutal the interrogations would become.

The torture scandal has made clear how little protection American laws provide to U.S. victims. Lawyers for four British citizens who had been locked up at Guantanamo from 2002 to 2004 sued U.S. officials, seeking damages for the illegal detention and torture they suffered. In January 2008 federal Judge Karen Henderson rejected their lawsuit, declaring that “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.” A federal appeals court ruled: “It was foreseeable that conduct that would ordinarily be indisputably ‘seriously criminal’ would be implemented by military officials responsible for detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants.” The court ruled that the officials could not be sued because they were merely carrying out their official duties. The fact that they were following Bush’s orders gave them legal immunity in American courts—a tacit revocation of the Nuremberg doctrines established in the war-crimes trials after World War II. Eric Lewis, the detainees’ lawyer, lamented, “It is an awful day for the rule of law and common decency when a court finds that torture is all in a day’s work for the secretary of defense and senior generals.”

In recent years, the U.S. government has appropriated the title of the Supreme Defender of World Freedom, akin to the Catholic Church’s role as the defender of the true faith in earlier centuries. During the Inquisition, torture was justified to rid the world of heresy. Bush, who promised to “rid the world of evil,” perhaps feels justified in using torture to achieve his transcendent goal.

But this is where one of the problems arises. In the days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush talked about al Qaeda as the target of U.S. efforts. The target list soon expanded to include the Taliban, the Afghan rulers who had provided sanctuary to al Qaeda. Bush later added “radicals” and “extremists” to the list of enemies. Attorney General Gonzales declared in 2006 that it is “essential that we continue to develop the tools we need to investigate . . . and prosecute those who travel down the road of radicalization.” There is nothing to constrain a politician from labeling his opponents “radicals”—as has happened repeatedly in American history.

Total Discretion in Labeling Enemies

Some people support torture because they are confident that the government will only barbarize foreigners. This was how Bush’s power to designate enemy combatants was first sold to the public—as something that would only be applied to foreign perils. But after José Padilla was arrested in Chicago in 2002, his American citizenship did not save him from brutality while incarcerated in South Carolina and elsewhere in the United States. Once the government decrees that someone has no rights, it is a small step to declare that there will be no limits on how the government treats that person.

Some Americans support torture because of their distrust or hostility to Muslims, the usual target of contemporary extreme American interrogation methods. But the government claims the right to designate as enemy combatants (and thus eligible for torture) alleged members or supporters of any designated terrorist group. Irish Americans could be at risk of torture if the feds alleged they were linked to the Real Irish Republican Army, and Jews could face similar perils if the feds alleged their connection to the Sword of David or American Friends of the United Yeshiva Movement. Human Rights Watch warned in 2005 that the government’s terrorist-group designation process has been “challenged in the courts for being vague, overbroad, and for there being no transparent criteria for listing entities on the lists or removing entities from the lists.”

Torture supposedly saves lives by providing the surest way to get the evidence of a “ticking time bomb.” There are no good verified examples of that from American experience. However, it was torture that produced “evidence” that spurred the American public to support Bush’s rush to war against Iraq. The “smoking gun” linking al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein came from an al Qaeda operative captured in Afghanistan, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. Secretary of State Colin Powell relied on al-Libi’s information for his February 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council. However, Powell did not know that al-Libi had been tortured in Egypt—where he was “renditioned” by U.S. agents.

Had it not been for the torture of al-Libi, thousands of American soldiers might still be alive, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would not have perished in the 2003 invasion and the subsequent civil war.

Torture is not a “bleeding heart” issue; instead, it is simply a question of whether a president will have absolute power. In reality, the Bush administration’s torture policies are simply the most vivid example of its belief that the president is now permitted to do as he pleases. Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury declared in 2006: “Under the law of war, the president is always right.” Bradbury also informed a closed congressional committee in 2006 that Bush has the authority on his own to order killings of suspected terrorists within the United States. Bradbury’s assertion stirred zero controversy—despite the administration’s long record of false accusations of terrorist connections. The vast majority of people charged in federal terrorist investigations have not been convicted on terrorism charges.

To Zealously Defend the Constitution

The genius of the Founding Fathers was to recognize that the existence of perils cannot justify absolute power. The Constitution was created by a generation of men who had fought a war against the most powerful government in the world. At the same time, it was also a civil war, thanks to the pervasive Tory sympathizers in many parts of the colonies. The Constitution was not made for sunny days and smooth sailing. Instead, it was crafted for hard times, with many provisions for dealing with deadly threats to the nation’s survival. For a contemporary president to effectively claim that he can no longer be bound by the Constitution is an insult to the Founding Fathers who survived far harsher tests in their time than America did on and after 9/11.

by Gregory Clark

Princeton University Press • 2007 • 420 pages • $29.95

Reviewed by Gene Callahan

Economic historian Gregory Clark has written a fascinating book offering a serious challenge to the currently predominant explanation of why, beginning around 1800, “Western” societies have experienced a rate of economic growth never before seen in history. Clark supports his case with an impressive body of empirical evidence, making his challenge impossible to ignore.

Contemporary economists commonly propose that the West experienced its recent, unprecedented growth because there alone people finally hit upon the “right” institutions to promote prosperity. Just why they did so has been attributed to various causes. Max Weber, for example, pointed to the Protestant exaltation of worldly success as the key factor.

However, Clark contends that the historical evidence does not support this thesis. To the contrary, as he illustrates with many instances, the conditions supposedly responsible for the unique phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution also were present in a number of other societies. For example, late-medieval and Renaissance England was characterized by tax rates hovering around 1 or 2 percent, negligible government budget deficits, secure property rights, little violent crime, extensive social mobility, and active markets in land and capital. But centuries passed before the surge in English productivity occurred. Clark argues that such cases demonstrate that the institutional explanation is unsatisfactory.

Instead, Clark claims that the Neolithic Revolution, when humans first adopted agriculture, meant that certain traits, which previously had been unimportant, became pro-survival. These included skill in the symbolic thinking, particularly literacy and numeracy, needed to follow increasingly complex transactions, the self-control to forgo some current consumption in favor of ensuring future success, a lowered preference for leisure over labor, and the reduced impulse to employ violence. Clark proposes that, over the millennia separating the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions, the reproductive advantage yielded by such traits gradually made them commonplace in agricultural societies, transforming the character of their populations and finally producing modern “bourgeois” society.

Clark notes that his thesis doesn’t mean that those humans who embraced agriculture were intellectually superior to those who did not. In fact, a medieval English peasant’s productivity peaked around the age of 20, while a hunter from the Ache tribe of South America doesn’t reach maximum productivity until 40, indicating that the hunter is mastering the more complex set of cognitive skills. Rather, a settled farming existence rewards forms of intelligence that are irrelevant to a hunter-gatherer, forms that are prerequisites for sustained economic growth. Groups that adopted agriculture did so under environmental pressures rendering hunting and gathering progressively inadequate sources of sustenance, certainly with no inkling that ten thousand years later their choice would make their descendants wealthy.

In fact, as Clark demonstrates with various measures, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the members of technologically advanced societies achieved better living standards than “primitive” tribesmen. As the chief culprit responsible for this counterintuitive economic stagnation, he points to the “Malthusian trap” in which all of humanity, prior to 1800, was ensnared. In that condition, any advance in technology resulted, not in greater individual well-being, but only in population growth sufficient to negate the productivity gains, leaving incomes unchanged.

While Clark makes a compelling case for his thesis, there are a few places where I think he goes astray. For example, he shows that modern, high-growth economies operate under higher tax burdens and levels of governmental economic intervention than did their low-growth predecessors. He suggests that this finding contradicts the belief held by many economists that a minimally intrusive government is a major factor promoting prosperity. But I suspect that he may have put the cart before the horse: perhaps only prosperous societies can afford expansive government and would be even wealthier in its absence.

Clark also feels compelled to disparage historians whose research, unlike his, focuses on historical specifics, claiming that the “individual personalities and events, so beloved of narrative historians, do not matter [for an explanation of the Industrial Revolution].” That irrelevance is not, as he appears to be suggesting, a conclusion discovered in the course of his research, but is rather an inherent consequence of the methods he has adopted: if one’s attention is fixed on searching for macro-level trends in data aggregates, then it’s hardly surprising that the different details one has generalized away do not appear in one’s results.

What does this thesis imply for attempts to spur Third World development? Clark argues that there is “no simple economic medicine” with which wealthy nations can “cure” poverty if modern growth arose from the long, gradual transformation of individuals’ characters. The best, short-term prospect for the residents of the world’s poorest countries is to allow them to immigrate into rich nations, where they can share in the benefits of that evolutionary process. The dismal results of decades of programs aimed at promoting Third World growth suggest that Clark has a point.

Gene Callahan is the author of Economics for Real People.

Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t

by John Lott

Regnery Publishing • 2007 • 275 pages • $27.95

Reviewed by Robert P. Murphy

Lately economists have been making it onto the bookshelves of Barnes & Noble with breezy volumes for the lay reader. The most striking example of this newfound hipness is Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics. John Lott’s Freedomnomics, another example, is itself largely a response to that runaway bestseller.

In taking on some of Levitt and Dubner’s glib dismissals of the free market, Lott doesn’t disappoint. In my favorite duel, Lott quotes Freakonomics‘ rendition of the “problem of the lemons” in the used-car market. Because of asymmetric information, the authors casually claim that a new $20,000 car can’t be resold for more than $15,000 (because people will assume it is defective) and that the owner of a lemon should just wait a year in order to fool buyers.

From the first time I heard this particular market-failure story in college, I thought it was wrong, but never bothered to follow my hunch. Fortunately, Lott isn’t nearly as lazy. He asks the reader to imagine he has just bought a $20,000 car but needs to resell it immediately. Assuming the car is in perfect condition, is it really true that the owner needs to eat $5,000 due to imperfect markets? Lott transforms the problem: “Here is the real question: can you convince someone for, let’s say, $4,000 that there is nothing wrong with your car? What about for $500? Could you hire the car’s original manufacturer to inspect the car and certify that it’s in brand new condition?”

Typical for Lott, he doesn’t stop with these rhetorical musings. He did the research and found that for cars with only a few thousand miles, the “certified used car price was on average just 3 percent less than the new car MSRP [manufacturer's suggested retail price],” while cars that were a year old sold for 14 percent less than the new car MSRP. This directly contradicts the tale in Freakonomics, but accords entirely with common sense.

Like others of its genre, Freedomnomics is full of “Didja ever wonder why . . . ?” explanations. For example, one reason that lunch prices are lower than dinner prices is that diners linger over their meals longer at night, tying up the valuable table. Here’s another: last-minute airline tickets aren’t expensive just because “you have no options.” Rather, the airlines are providing a service by holding some seats for last-minute travelers, and they need to be compensated for the chance that those tickets will go unsold. And do you want to know why the spread between self- and full-service gasoline gets smaller as the grade of gasoline improves? If so, you’ll just have to buy Lott’s book.

I enjoyed Freedomnomics and can honestly say that I was sorry when it ended. Even so, I did have some serious misgivings, which I think many Freeman readers will share. In his efforts to debunk popular misconceptions about our “way of life,” Lott goes beyond defending the free market. He defends the American political system too, making it sound as if anyone who criticizes U.S. politics must be a whiny leftist who hates McDonald’s to boot. In a particularly inexplicable section, Lott argues that despite a few bad apples, “the vast majority of American politicians and businessmen” remain untainted by charges of corruption. This is because “there is a powerful incentive toward honest behavior that is built into our democratic political system and free market economy—that of maintaining a good reputation.”

Now what’s incredible is that Lott then goes through and explains point by point why the incentives for honest marketplace behavior are not present in the political sphere. (For example, a firm’s good name can be sold, whereas a political record cannot.) When one also factors in items that Lott doesn’t discuss—such as the lack of free entry into the political realm and the fact that 49 percent of the population can be forced to deal with a politician they despise as a liar—it is all the more mysterious why he didn’t write a section explaining why politicians are more likely to be crooked than a businessperson in a free market.

My final objection is that Lott at times is blatantly partisan, seeming to overlook that Republicans have grown government quite nicely during George W. Bush’s tenure. Space doesn’t permit me to justify my charge of partisanship, but suffice it to say that at one point Lott declares, “Remarkably, it looks as if virtually all felons are Democrats.” I promise that I’m not taking that out of context.

Despite its shortcomings, Freedomnomics is an enjoyable read for those who can’t get enough economics books for the layperson. Libertarian readers will be put off by Lott’s casual attitude toward certain aspects of government intervention, but they will learn much from the book to compensate.

Robert Murphy is senior fellow in Business and Economic Studies at Pacific Research Institute and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism.

Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval that Inspired America’s Founding Fathers

by Michael Barone

Crown/Three Rivers Press • 2007/2008 • 270 pages • $25.95, hardcover; $14.95, paperback

Reviewed by Martin Morse Wooster

In the mid-1980s Michael Barone, a columnist for U.S. News and World Report and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, decided he would write a history of American politics from 1930 to 1988. “Since I had never written a narrative book before,” he writes, “I decided to read some of the great narrative history.” He read Thomas Macaulay’s multivolume The History of England from the Accession of James II.

Ever since then, Barone says, he’s been interested in the Glorious Revolution, the struggle of 1688–89 that ended with the ousting of Britain’s King James II and his replacement by the team of King William III and his wife, Queen Mary II. This revolution, he writes, was “a significant step forward for representative government, guaranteed liberties, global competition, and a foreign policy of overcoming hegemonic tyranny.”

As Barone observes, when the Founding Fathers were rebelling against Britain, they modeled their complaints against the British Crown on those made in 1688. If we are to understand what the Founders were thinking when they made their enduring arguments for freedom, we need to know what happened during the Glorious Revolution. If you’re interested in the history of liberty, you’ll find Michael Barone a very good guide.

It should be noted that Our First Revolution is very much a book for Americans unfamiliar with British history. British readers will find that the book tills familiar fields. Readers who enjoy Barone’s columns should know that he is as forceful and eloquent at longer lengths as he is in op-eds.

When King Charles II died of a stroke in 1685, his death provoked a political crisis in England. Charles’s brother, James II, succeeded him. King James had converted to Catholicism. Britain was a Protestant nation, and the Church of England was (and is) the state church. Many foes of King James feared that his goal was to force Protestants out of the military and religious posts, and possibly to crush Protestants as ruthlessly as the kings of France had.

King James tried to loosen the connections between church and state to allow Catholics to become high-ranking military officers. He also made fitful attempts to reach out to Dissenters—Protestants who were not affiliated with the Church of England.

But King James, in Barone’s view, wasn’t a very smart man. He exploited ambiguities in the nature of Parliament at the time. Parliament existed and had some control over government spending during wartime. But it did not meet regularly, and British monarchs thought they had enough control over excise taxes that they could rule without Parliament.

King James intimated that he could try to rule without Parliament. He also tried to pack lightly populated rural election districts with enough pro-Catholic voters to ensure that Catholics were elected to Parliament,

Then in 1688 the court announced that King James’s wife, Mary of Modena, was pregnant. If Queen Mary gave birth to a son, that Catholic child would have precedence to the throne over James’s Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne. Protestants, fearing a permanent restoration of Catholic rule began what became known as the Glorious Revolution, in which James and his court fled for France, while James’s daughter Mary and her husband, King William III of Holland, jointly ruled the throne.

King William was engaged in wars with France and needed Parliament’s help to pay the bill. Moreover, the king wanted to ensure the legitimacy of his rule. So Parliament began to meet continuously. In 1689 William issued the Bill of Rights, which for the first time said that his subjects had rights—to worship as they pleased, to have a trial by jury without having the jury packed by the court, and not to have excessive bail placed on them if they were arrested. Protestants were allowed “arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and allowed by law.” And the Crown had to get Parliamentary approval for any spending.

By doing this, Barone writes, King William ensured that Britain would have a representative government that would not be threatened by a monarch wishing to reach for absolute power. The king’s legacy also reached to America. When the Framers were drafting the Constitution, the model they used for the Bill of Rights was the document King William had approved in 1689. Many of the protections in the American Bill of Rights—including the right to bear arms—were based on the bill King William signed a century before.

The Glorious Revolution is an unjustly neglected advance for freedom and liberty, and Americans should know more about it. Anyone interested in the history of liberty ought to read Michael Barone’s excellent book.

Martin Morse Wooster, an author living in Silver Spring, Maryland, frequently reviews history.

Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America Into a Nation of Children

by David Harsanyi

Broadway Books • 2007 • 236 pages • $24.95

Reviewed by George Leef

Several years ago I drove a colleague to his house a little more than a mile from the office. While driving back over city streets at low speeds, I was stopped by a policeman. Why? Because I had neglected to buckle my seatbelt. For having ignored that nanny-state regulation, I was hit with a ticket.

Alas, the nanny state is not confined just to traffic enforcement in my town. It has spread across the whole of America, and almost every day some new mandate or prohibition is decreed. For example, Washington dictates that we must use only certain kinds of light bulbs and may not use the Internet for gambling; and officials in San Francisco demand that “pet guardians” (their approved term for pet owners) must have a tip-proof water dish for Fido and change the water at least once a day.

In Nanny State, Denver Post reporter David Harsanyi surveys the numerous fronts on which America’s elected officials are waging war against our freedom. He covers the crusades being waged against alcohol, tobacco, pornography, junk foods, and other things that some people like but others detest. “As you read this,” he writes, “countless do-gooders across the nation are rolling up their sleeves to do the vital work of getting your life straightened out for you.” Freeman readers all know about this malignant trend, but seeing the big picture is really frightening.

The idea that the government needs to treat us like children is everywhere. Republicans and Democrats both love the nanny-state concept, although they sometimes disagree on exactly where to apply it.

Many Republicans, especially of the social-conservative faction, demand nanny-state measures to save us from our own immorality, enthusiastically pursuing laws against gambling, drugs, and other real or imagined vices. Such initiatives are presumably of no interest to “liberal” Democrats, who instead demand that government control us so we’ll be safer, healthier, and kinder to the planet. Unfortunately, Harsanyi points out, the different factions don’t fight each other. Instead, they seem to have worked out a pact that says, “We won’t try to block your do-gooderism if you won’t try to block ours.”

Unlike a real nanny or parent who just sends you to your room if you aren’t good, the modern nanny state is prepared to use force against its disobedient children. Harsanyi relates some utterly jaw-dropping stories where the state arrives in SWAT gear and packing heat. When it comes to cracking down on Things That Are Bad, the nanny staters are happy to copy the tactics of Prohibition enforcers—armed raids in the middle of the night. Furthermore, police-state enforcement doesn’t much trouble the Supreme Court, which found no constitutional problem in jailing a mother who had briefly and slowly driven her car with a child unbuckled.

Arresting a mother in front of her children is pretty disgusting, but Harsanyi has even worse tales to tell. In 1998 a SWAT team was sent along with officials who were intent on serving a warrant on a gambling operation. A security guard who thought the intruders were a criminal gang was fatally shot in the confusion. Just some “collateral damage” in the great war to rid America of vice.

Slowly but surely our freedom to live as we please is being erased by self-righteous crusaders who believe themselves entitled to use coercion to make us behave the way they know we should. Their crusades are a terrible menace to what’s left of liberty in America.

My only quarrel with the book is Harsanyi’s optimistic statement that our burgeoning nannyism “is anathema to the spirit of the American people.” I’m afraid that such spirit was broken long ago. It was broken not by niggling annoyances like mandatory seat-belt usage, but by massive frontal assaults such as Social Security and compulsory school attendance. Once the authoritarians among us had established that they could get away with huge infringements on freedom, the Nanny State became a sure thing. People accustomed to the lash won’t rebel at frequent spankings with a willow switch.

The sad fact is that most Americans have had the spirit of independence crushed out of them, thanks to government education and other sources of collectivist propaganda. Has any politician ever been voted out of office for his support of nannyism? I’m not aware of even one instance. I rest my pessimistic case.

Still, damp as the kindling may be, it is worth the effort to ignite the indignation at the continuing encroachments on our liberty.

George Leef is book review editor of The Freeman.

If originalism entails the problem Davies raises, it also has at least one more. Original intent, meaning, or understanding is inevitably multiple. John L. O’Sullivan, former editor of the Democratic Review, noticed this in 1862. The Constitution, he wrote, was America’s “ark of the covenant,” but “no man could ever exactly say what the Constitution was.” Its “elastic generalities of phrase” hid the deep divide “between the ‘Consolidation’ and the ‘State Rights’ parties in the Convention.. . .” Constitutional interpretation had been “twofold from the outset . . . Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian, or indeed Northern and Southern.” There was “not one . . . universally recognised Constitution, but two, widely different, and indeed conflicting” (my italics).

But what of our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation? For a time, they suited most of the people and the states. On the other hand, a vocal group in Congress was violently unhappy over the Articles’ failure to establish effective federal (national) power. Joseph Jones of Virginia, newly arrived in mid-1780, complained, “This Body never had or at least in few instances have exercised powers adequate to the purposes of war. . . .” Charles Thomson lamented in 1784, “A government without a visible head must appear a strange phenomenon to European politicians. . . .”

With new members, a dangerous optical malady often set in—“Continental Vision.” Writing to James Madison on February 20, 1784, Thomas Jefferson described the process: “[Young statesmen learn to] see the affairs of the Confederacy from a high ground; they learn the importance of the Union & befriend federal measures when they return.” Continental vision and “insufficient” power: Here was a dilemma, one that American nationalists—James Wilson, Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris, and many others—determined to resolve. In their view, the country needed a mercantilist political economy, a standing army, public debt, and effective central taxation—things structurally and systematically interrelated. Nationalists wanted central power, as much of it as possible. Under the Confederation they made some interesting attempts to get it. We may begin with war powers.

Invoking vague war powers, early American nationalists urged that Congress ought to have certain powers and, therefore, did or “must” have them, neatly getting an “is” from an “ought.” Big on assertion, Congress spent the war complaining of its lack of real power, including power to tax. Yet mysteriously, Americans defeated Britain without anyone’s giving Congress many powers it craved or claimed. What actually happened?

Acting Without Authority

In practice, Congress coordinated revolutionary activity in the 13 incipient states and conducted diplomatic activity in their (plural) name. In so doing, Congress constantly recommended specific actions to the states, relying on them to carry the measures out. Before ratification of the Articles (1781), Congress often undertook measures for which it could show no obvious authority whatsoever, including the debt it created, its adoption of a European-style code of military “justice” for the Continental Army, and its creation of that army itself. Congress could only appeal to the wartime emergency, iron necessity, “public safety,” and the like. Under the Articles, nationalists complained endlessly of the powers Congress had “lost” with ratification. They referred of course to earlier congressional claims of inherent power—those being “proven” by the fact that Americans in their states had been good enough to cooperate. The price of following Congress’s advice and recommendations was to be told later that one had followed orders and obeyed commands.

American historians largely agree with the original claimants. Legal historian Edward S. Corwin was a case in point. Congress had, he admits, “no real governing power.” The states, on Congress’s recommendations, seized property, repressed Tories, suspended habeas corpus, and undertook “measure after measure that entrenched upon the normal life of the community drastically.” Regrouping, he concludes: “The fact, however, that this legislation came from the state legislatures whereas the war power was attributed to the United States in the Continental Congress served to obscure the fact that the former was really an outgrowth of the latter.”

This calls to mind the paradox, which I have noted previously (“On Misplaced Concreteness in Social Theory,” The Freeman, May 2006), whereby actual successful social action tends to be denounced as a dreadful evil or social problem. In the case at hand, cooperation serves to allocate authority away from those who acted. Whether that authority really entailed a spectral “war power” need not detain us. Whatever that last abstraction did for Congress from 1776 to 1781, and even under the Articles, 1781–1783, it did very little for it after 1783 without the war. Nationalists saw this problem coming. Late in the war, Gouverneur Morris hoped for “a Continuance of the War, which will convince people of the necessity of Obedience to common Counsels. . . .”

In the hunt for added congressional powers, nationalists employed deductions from International Law and pleaded Machiavellian necessities and moments. According to Merrill Jensen, they sought “to establish precedents [from which] they could argue the sovereignty of Congress.” Jensen stresses the interest of certain land companies in having their titles confirmed by the higher “government,” as well as the public creditors’ desire to have depreciated paper claims redeemed at somewhere near face value.

Hamilton hoped Congress would simply assert “undefined Powers” and see what they got away with. They should “assume Congress had once had such powers.” Boldness was needed to build a governing coalition of army, public creditors, and other nationalists. Madison was more indirect. In a Report to Congress in March 1781, he, James Duane, and James Varnum asserted a “general and implied power. . . to carry into effect all the Articles of the said Confederation against any of the States” but could find “no determinate and particular provision.” They therefore urged amendment of the Articles so that Congress could “employ the force of the United States” against states failing to meet funding requisitions.

After Rhode Island rejected an amendment to create a federal impost, Hamilton, Madison, and Thomas FitzSimons drew up a lengthy Congressional Reply in December 1782, calling the impost “a measure of necessity.” Congress, they urged, had “an indefinite power of prescribing the quantity of money to be raised.” This brought the impost “within the spirit of the Confederation.” Further, Congress, “empowered to borrow money,” had power “by implication, to concert the means necessary to accomplish that end.” Arguing against Rhode Island’s position, Robert Morris—federal financial czar—wrote on October 24, 1782, “[I]f a thing be neither wrong nor forbidden it must be admissible [and] if complied with, will by that very compliance become constitutional.” Now, mere acquiescence was “consent,” and consent bred legality. Meanwhile, having thought the thing over, other states had “rescinded” their earlier approval of the impost amendment.

Nationalist aspirations for revenue did not lessen with time. In a speech on January 28, 1783, Madison found “general revenue” to be “within the spirit of the Confederation.” Hamilton agreed, but un-bagged the cat by saying, “[I]t was expedient to introduce the influence of officers deriving their emolument from . . . Congress.” Madison often suggested naval blockades of offending states. He seems also to have spotted an implied power to coerce the states, even without an amendment. (Thirty years later, as president, Madison tried to coerce Britain and France with an embargo, but got the War of 1812 instead.) Even Governor George Clinton of New York spied an implied “Power of compelling the several States to their Duty and thereby enabling the Confederacy to expel the common Enemy.”

But Congress could not make the states ratify an amendment for a modest impost, much less one for their own coercion or blockade. For now, big notions drawn from Machiavelli, Vattel, and Pufendorf were of no avail. They did serve, however, in building both nationalist ideology and a theory of the union, and they yet serve historians who want philosophical foundations for the practical—even cynical—system the nationalists put over a few years later.

Another possible way out was the treaty power duly inscribed in the ninth Article of Confederation. In a centralizing mood, Jefferson himself, writing to James Monroe from Paris on June 17, 1785, advocated using the treaty power “to take the commerce of the states out of the hands of the states” and give it to Congress, which under the Articles had “no original and inherent power” over the subject. But Jefferson did not try to find implied powers in the Articles, nor did he deduce powers from some congressional sovereignty that “necessarily” arose under international law.

The treaty-power dodge reappeared much later, fueling the Old Right’s Bricker Amendment movement of the early 1950s. Senator John Bricker (R-Ohio) and his supporters wanted to keep Congress and the president from aggrandizing themselves under the vaguely worded treaty clause of the present constitution. They meant for their amendment, which failed in the Senate by one vote in February 1954, to meet the problem.

Utilizing Public Debt

Nationalists focused more and more on the public debt. Congress quit issuing credit money in late 1779. Thereafter, as Madison wrote to Jefferson on May 6, 1780, Congress became “as dependent on the States as the King of England is on the Parliament.” Nationalists saw this situation as completely improper. And so, Lance Banning observes, they “proposed to use the national debt to create a single nation—or at least an integrated national elite—where none existed in 1783.”

E. James Ferguson writes, “The Union was a league of states rather than a national system because Congress lacked the power of taxation. This was not an oversight.” Further, the federal debt itself was “inconsistent” with such a union. Jack N. Rakove adds, “Congress lacked the effective power or, once the Articles were ratified, the constitutional right either to levy taxes on its own authority, or to compel the states to obey its recommendations. It is certainly true that the states would never have ratified the Articles had they contained such provisions. . . .”

Nationalists feared the states would pay off the debt. Like the English Whigs in 1649, they needed the debt as the “cement” of union, as Hamilton called it. The debt was needed, in Rakove’s words, “to justify endowing Congress with independent revenues.” If revenue were found, public creditors and the underpaid officer class would rally to the cause of national power. All these advocates well understood the inflationary potential of consolidated public debt in the hands of fractional-reserve bankers. The economy would boom under their own profitable management.

Nationalists conducted an unrestrained campaign against the Confederation’s limits on power. “Water would not boil” due to the Articles. More important, nationalists discovered The People. Within doors, Federalists habitually denounced the people as a great rabble, the source of danger, wild enthusiasms, paper money, and attacks on property. Now they hastened to embrace John Locke’s empty marker of popular sovereignty to justify a takeover in the name of the people. Then they hustled the people off stage so the new machine “could go of itself.”

Social-Contract Theory

Anyone who reads Madison’s enormous journal of the Constitutional Convention will find the delegates arguing a mass of undigested social-contract theory big enough to sicken a hog. Here is an economical explanation: ambitious men with political, economic, and ideological motives wanted a central government with vague (therefore large) powers. They had, doubtlessly, a certain kind of public spirit. The system they created unfolded its inherent defects over time. To provide cover for their more specific goals—power, profit, prosperity, fisheries, security for slavery, land grabbing, glory, fame, good government—the framers issued great clouds of political “science” and theory that have confused Americans ever since. Madison was the outstanding mystifier, but there were others. Nationalists artfully decried the governments of the states while championing the Sovereign People, neatly dodging the question of who the people were and whether there were 13 peoples or one.

The constitutional deed and its defending rationales do not seem much grander than the origins of many other states. But as Jesse Lienesch has written, the founders succeeded in presenting themselves as demigods who saved the nation. It is a point of American orthodoxy to believe them. Charles Beard and J. Allen Smith, seconded by Albert Jay Nock, got much flak for recognizing that the Federalists had mixed motives and self-serving goals.

To win ratification, American nationalists, rechristened as “Federalists,” sold the new Constitution as a document involving “limited” and “enumerated” powers. On this reading, any power not obviously granted was not granted and the new outfit would not have it. Having cornered themselves verbally, Federalists showed their original understanding in the first Congress by enacting all manner of laws directly in conflict with their assurances to the ratifying conventions. Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania especially noted the Judiciary Act, Hamilton’s funding system, economic coercion to force Rhode Island to ratify the Constitution, the War Department, a standing army—and federal consolidation generally. (See Maclay’s Journal at http://tinyurl.com/3ch2nm.) Seeing this, the Federalists’ opponents, with a different original understanding, argued for theirs as “Republicans” led by Jefferson, John Taylor, and others. They meant to hold the former promising parties to their pledges. Historian Garry Wills affirms that the ratifiers were somewhat swindled, but holds this to be a universal blessing that makes modern American governance possible.

And for all their high-minded talk about The People, popular consent, and so on, nationalists did not rule out violence. Benjamin Rush wrote Richard Price on June 2, 1787, that, if needed, “force will not be wanting,” since the wealthy and military classes wanted a new government. As Jensen writes, “It was power, not powers, that they wanted.”

Could the nationalizers have gotten their way by ingeniously stretching the Articles? One possible way would have been to filch the states’ powers and reassemble them into a collective power. Nationalists might have contended that a majority of congressional delegations—each delegation embodying, fully and immediately, its state’s separate sovereign powers—could, in concert, do any old thing, outside the Articles, that came to mind. Similar ideas had yielded results before the Articles came into force in 1781.

The nationalists were not the sort to be denied power. They might have made interesting inroads by discovering “indefinite” or “implied” powers, or by invoking the Articles’ “spirit.” Patiently accumulating “precedents,” they could cash them in, down the road, as grounded on powers that had always “been there.” But nationalists were not as patient as, say, the Supreme Court.

And certain structural advantages still remained to the states and the people(s). Their key advantage involved taxation. Congress had to ask the states for its money. It still seems a good arrangement.

Here our sub-theme—originalism—returns. It appears that original contestants contested many constitutional “meanings” at the very beginning. On this view, any simple originalism means clinging to original mistakes. The framers’ opinions were certainly original; how or whether they dictate to us today through the ether is another matter.

Works Used

1. Lance Banning, “James Madison and the Nationalists, 1780–1783,” William & Mary Quarterly, April 1983.
2. Edward S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers, New York, 1957.
3. Thomas Y. Davies, “Correcting Search and Seizure History,” Mississippi Law Journal, vol. 77, 2007.
4. Jonathan Elliot, Debates in the State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, I, 1973 [1830]).
5. E. James Ferguson, “The Nationalists of 1781–1783 and the Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,” Journal of American History, September 1969.
6. E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961.
7. Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, IV, New York, 1904.
8. Merrill Jensen, “The Idea of a National Government during the American Revolution,” Political Science Quarterly, September 1943.
9. Jesse Lienesch, “The Constitutional Tradition: History, Political Action, and Progress in American Political Thought, 1787–1793,” Journal of Politics, February 1980.
10. William Maclay, The Journal of William Maclay, United States Senator from Pennsylvania, 1789–1791, New York, 1965.
11. Roger McBride, Treaties versus the Constitution, New York, 1955.
12. John L. O’Sullivan, Union, Disunion, and Reunion: A Letter to General Franklin Pierce, London, 1862.
13. Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics, New York, 1979.
14. Murray Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, IV, New Rochelle, N.Y., 1979.

Many libertarians employ the term “Founders” as if to provide a degree of respectability to ideas that seem increasingly out of date (at least to the public at large). A recent New York Times column by David Brooks, however, helps clarify that not all the Founders were created equal.

Brooks sees four schools of political economy in America today: 1) the limited-government conservatives and libertarians, who want to leave everything to the market; 2) mainstream liberals, who want to tinker with the market to dampen its creative destruction; 3) the populists, who want to rewrite the rules of the global trading order to tilt the balance toward the poor; and 4) the Hamiltonians, Brooks’s group, “who believe in free market capitalism but think government should help people get the tools they need to compete in it.”

While Brooks attempts to distinguish four schools, only two actually exist, consisting of those who see a vast pool of resources that government can control with the help of intellectuals and those who see societies as groupings of individuals over whom no one should exert control.

One thing is certain: Brooks comes straight from the Hamiltonian mold. Alexander Hamilton’s original economic plan, presented to Congress in 1790 and 1791, was a model of centralization, and it set the stage for future federal intervention. By suggesting that the national government assume the debts of the states, Hamilton helped build its dominance. As secretary of the treasury he commanded a staff of more than a thousand and was known for his involvement in even the most minute details of the department. Hamilton was a personification of Adam Smith’s “men of system.”

Sadly, Brooks’s Hamiltonian faith in government string-pulling is in this spirit. In his recent op-ed “Reviving the Hamilton Agenda” and his previous appeals to National-Greatness Conservatism, Brooks has itemized a list of state undertakings that rapidly approach infinity. What the measures he endorses in the op-ed all have in common is their objective of empowering government to “help people compete.”

It’s fairly easy to understand Brooks’s intuition here. The government has resources (never mind where they come from) and people need skills. Put the two together and you have a system designed to turn out a highly trained, globally competitive workforce. It’s a wonderful idea, except for its utter flouting of theory and history.

Many who read this magazine put on their Public Choice glasses when they see a new policy offered. Instead of thinking about the rosy outcome that will theoretically occur, they ask themselves a series of questions. By the time the policy proposal travels from the politicians’ (or intellectuals’) lips to passage by Congress, what are the odds that it will look anything like the original or still serve its stated goal? What perverse incentives will the government agency that enforces this policy face? Is there any organization or powerful lobby that will get a bite at the apple before or during the policy’s enactment?

While these questions don’t usually endear a libertarian to the more sentimental and optimistic among us, they do often keep us from signing on to childish fantasies that would require the U.S. government to act like a responsible and reasonable agency of positive change.

On the two large priorities the Hamiltonian Brooks sets, however—increasing economic dynamism and human capital—it’s hard for any reasonable individual to disagree. The problem is with his solutions. On the former, Brooks acknowledges that our behemoth Social Security and Medicare systems are liabilities. For Social Security he recommends raising the retirement age, which I hope he recognizes is a Band-Aid fix at best, and for Medicare his answer is opaque and thus utterly meaningless: “tackl[e] medical inflation to make Medicare affordable.”

As for his other priority, he writes, “No one policy can increase the quality of human capital, but a lifelong portfolio of policies can make a difference.” Among the policies he advocates are:

• Child tax credits

• Income support for young men

• Visits by nurses to single-family homes

• Preschool to help boost self-confidence

• Merit pay for teachers and a tweaking of certification

• Mentoring of teenagers by senior citizens

• Forced national service for young adults

• Government funding for science and math

Where government has engaged in these activities, it has failed. This is aside from the coercion necessary—forced national servitude?—for the state to carry them out.

Why doesn’t Brooks leave the market alone to handle both dynamism and human capital? His only answer is this: “We Hamiltonians disagree with the limited government conservatives because, on its own, the market is failing to supply enough human capital. Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation.”

The upcoming 2008 edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States shows that only 11 percent of elementary and high-school students are enrolled in private schools and an estimated 2.2 percent of students are homeschooled. The vast majority of students are products of government schools. I don’t know about you, but if I were to place the blame for high dropout rates and a generally inadequate student population, I would look first to the government’s schools. (As an aside, the “dropout” rate is misnamed, Alan Reynolds writes, because it includes many immigrants who never attended schools in the United States and hence could not have dropped out.)

College Graduation

The flat college-graduation rate is likely related to the poor performance of government’s elementary and secondary schools, which do a bad job of preparing students for college. That’s why so many students take high-school-level courses in their freshman year. A related explanation is the booming enrollment rate. The government encourages virtually everyone to go to college, and makes money and loans available for that purpose. The U.S. Department of Education says, “Enrollment in degree-granting institutions increased by 17 percent between 1984 and 1994. Between 1994 and 2004, enrollment increased at a faster rate (21 percent), from 14.3 million to 17.3 million.” If more students are starting college only because government lowers the cost, then it’s not surprising that the graduation rate has not picked up.

Brooks is right that human capital—skills and knowledge—helps individuals to perform in the global marketplace. But that marketplace is constantly changing, and it’s hard to imagine government establishing training programs that could adequately keep up with the dynamic nature of world commerce.

Does this mean we just throw up our hands in defeat? Certainly not. Indeed, the companies that look to tap into the extraordinary productivity levels of American workers won’t let that happen. From the funding of higher education to the expansive network of job training, those who profit from America’s relatively stable legal environment, talented workforce, and deep stock of capital pump billions of dollars into developing human capital. For the “men of system,” however, the “unplanned” nature of private-sector investments in human capital is too chaotic. Hence, Brooks’s Hamiltonian revival.

We need less Hamilton and more Jefferson.

One such gambler took up his sword in the best of causes. Revolutionary War hero Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee commanded a unit in the Continental Army and helped found a freer country. But he was a devotee of the state and its trademark, force.

Nor was he alone in this paradox. Many of the Continental Army’s officers who pledged their “lives, fortunes and sacred honor” to fight British tyranny in the 1770s imposed their own when they rose to power in the new country. Even the man whom Lee eulogized as “First in war—first in peace—and first in the hearts of his countrymen” for leading an army against British taxation crushed an American tax revolt when he was president.

The motives that drove George Washington and other Founding Fathers to forget their revolutionary ideals can be hard to discern. Not in Lee’s case. His struggles are big, brash, transparent, and he paid a full and terrible price. Not only did his political principles eventually get him killed; his son Robert Edward would one day defy the very state his father championed.

Harry Lee was just 20 years old in 1776 when he enlisted with the Continental Army. Unlike other armies, the Continentals were not drafted, resentful ranks of the poor and powerless, kidnapped from fields and families to further a king’s ambitions. Rather, they rose from the people themselves as they defended their rights that unforgettable spring of 1775. Nor did any ruler summon them to war. Instead, their neighbors Paul Revere and William Dawes warned them that Redcoats were marching to seize a colonial arsenal at Concord. Hundreds and then thousands of farmers, merchants, and laborers not only chased the soldiers back to their base in Boston but bivouacked around the city to keep them there.

From that was born the Continental Army. Though the Continental Congress was just a few years older, it adopted the army that June and appointed George Washington its commander.

Ironically, the Continental Congress resorted to the very tactics its army fought. It taxed—or tried to: it was too weak to do more than ask the states to tax on its behalf. And it continued the Non-Importation Agreements of the 1760s in which the colonists promised to boycott British manufactures. They promised that their neighbors would too, and then searched the homes, shops, and ships of those they suspected of breaking the “agreement.” Their victims wondered why a warrantless search by one’s neighbors should be preferred to a warrantless search by the King’s customs agents: “tradesmen” in Boston asserted their right “to eat, drink and wear whatever we can honestly procure by our own labour; and to buy and sell when and where we please,” regardless of agreements or Congress.

These inconsistencies may have perplexed some Continental officers, but not Captain Lee. He seems to have loved the Continental Army and even the war itself rather than the principles behind both; he described himself as “wedded to my sword” and “affectionately wedded to my officers & troops.” One of his first exploits came during the horrific winter at Valley Forge, when he and seven other men held off the 200 Redcoats surrounding their quarters a few miles from the main camp. After killing three of the enemy, Lee shouted, “Fire away, men, here comes our infantry; we will have them all, God damn them!” The British believed him and scattered, making Lee the talk of the starving, shivering army.

The Captain eventually became a major. In 1779 he again proved his mettle by capturing Paulus Hook, one of the forts guarding the British stronghold of New York City. Today Paulus Hook is a neighborhood in the industrial port of Jersey City, N.J., but in the eighteenth century it sat at the end of a promontory that submerged at high tide. Lee planned to surprise its 400 defenders with a nighttime attack. This required intricate calculations of lunar phases, complete silence from his own 400 men, and trundling wagons over the dark, rutted roads so that spies would mistake his midnight march for a foraging expedition. Half of Lee’s troops lost their way and missed the attack, but the other half captured the fort’s garrison without a single casualty.

Meanwhile, some of the army’s dragoons had been detached as an independent command under Lee. “Lee’s Legion” became famous for its speed, skill, and loyalty: the high rates of desertion that depleted the rest of the Continental Army never drained the Legion. Lee loved and was beloved by his men. This was despite—or perhaps because of—his assumption that they were overgrown children, unfit to look after themselves and needing a strong leader. Lee transmuted this paternalism into a detailed concern for his troops. Other officers might not care how often their men bathed; Lee issued orders that kept his dragoons clean and healthy, then outfitted and dressed them at his own expense. “Lieut. Col. Henry Lee,” one of the army’s surgeons remembered, “was distinguished in our Revolutionary army, for the health and vigor of his corps. I never saw one of his men in the general hospital; and it was proverbial in camp, that Lee’s men and horses were always ready for action.” (Original emphasis.)

Their most valuable “action” came during the war’s last years, when the Legion helped General Nathanael Greene chase the Redcoats from the Carolinas. The Revolution’s northern campaigns had been brutal and bloody, but those of the south exceeded them. Lee’s Legion was in the thick of this warfare; it fought at Guilford Court House and at Eutaw Springs. More often, Lee’s force was detached from Greene’s for raids, and then the savagery raged without limits. Perhaps the Legion’s most shocking atrocity was “Pyle’s Hacking Match.”

Lee’s dragoons were pursuing British Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s band in North Carolina. In one of those wartime coincidences, Lee’s and Tarleton’s men both wore green uniforms. That led scouts from a Loyalist troop to assume they were among friends when they stumbled across the Legion. Lee exploited their mistake. He sent them back to their column with a request to clear the road so that their commander and his men might pass swiftly.

The 400 unsuspecting Loyalists lined the road on both sides, cheering “Tarleton’s” regiment. Then the joke soured. Lee later insisted that a Loyalist officer, recognizing the deception, ordered his troops to attack and that his own men killed in self-defense. But many people then and now think Lee planned all along to murder the Loyalists. Why else would he have engaged them? He could hardly burden himself with prisoners while galloping after Tarleton. The lopsided casualties also point to premeditation: when the bayoneting stopped, 90 Loyalists were dead with scores more fatally wounded. Lee’s Legion lost only a horse.

Lee’s Change of Heart

By February 1782 the soldier married to his sword wanted a divorce. Lee had discovered firsthand that warfare was not the splendor he had thought, that its brutality warped those bodies and souls it didn’t kill outright. He had executed deserters; in 1779, while patrolling the American lines, he had even severed and displayed the head of one victim as a warning. His men killed 18 British dragoons before breakfast one cold February morning in retaliation for their slaughter of the Legion’s unarmed bugler. On at least one occasion, before the battle at Guilford Court House, Lee tortured a prisoner for information (it didn’t work any better then than now: he learned nothing), and on another, his troops hanged three prisoners without trial.

Lee took these memories back to civilian life along with the conviction that Americans needed a strong centralized government to control their brutal natures. He held one political office after another, strengthening the state in whatever branch he found himself. He sat in Virginia’s legislature, represented the state in the Continental Congress from 1785 to 1789, was governor for three terms, and then went to the U.S. Congress.

Like most of his contemporaries, Lee considered a republic the state’s ideal form. Eighteenth-century Americans revered republics as the key to political paradise, much as their descendants do democracy. Ancient Rome and some of the Greek city-states had been republics; that would have been enough by itself to sway the classically schooled Founders. But the few republics since antiquity also seemed freer and more prosperous than the monarchies surrounding them.

Republics require virtuous citizens, or so the theory went. That meant most Americans fighting for freedom wanted government to enforce virtue lest the republic degenerate to tyranny. Lee and others went further: the state should actively make citizens virtuous. “It is high time,” he once wrote George Washington, “that our people be coerced to habits of industry.” The wise state must discipline citizens, especially during war. In April 1780 Lee and three other officers announced in a Philadelphia newspaper that they hoped to “curb the spirit of insolence and audacity” among those Americans who weren’t as dedicated to the Cause as the quartet thought they should be. They wanted to crush “a spirit of resistance, which . . . receives encouragement from the lenity of Governments, founded on principles of universal liberty and benevolence.” They would also “give energy . . . to the future operations of Government.”

Six years later Lee worked tirelessly for a Constitutional Convention and its promise of a strong central state. “The period seems to be fast approaching,” he insisted, “when the people of these U. States must determine to establish a permanent capable government or submit to the horrors of anarchy and licentiousness.” Discounting all history, he “dread[ed] more from the licentiousness of the people than from the bad government of rulers.”

Many republicans seemed to forget that republics were made for man, not man for the republic. John Adams found few aspects of life that couldn’t be turned to the republic’s good. He exhorted his wife to inculcate virtue in their children, not because virtue is desirable as an end in itself but because virtuous children became better citizens: “The Benevolence, Charity, Capacity and Industry which exerted in private Life, would make a family, a Parish or a Town Happy, employed upon a larger Scale . . . might secure whole Nations and Generations from Misery, Want and Contempt. Public Virtues, and political Qualities therefore should be incessantly cherished in our Children.” Republicans even believed that happiness depended not on personality or circumstances but on the character of the state. Lee asserted that “our national independence, and consequently our individual liberty . . . our peace and our happiness depend entirely on maintaining our union.”

As with some of the other Founders and many modern Americans, Lee’s republican politics were borrowed from Plato. A few choice men of superior virtue could and should guard the morals, actions, probably the speech, and even the thoughts of everyone else. These few included Lee, naturally. And if a few were born to lead, many, such as his troops and his political constituents, were born to follow.

Federalist Leadership

This ideology and his heroism on the battlefield catapulted Lee to leadership in the Federalist Party. His experiences during the war “proved” that without strong leaders men degenerate into beasts, violent and destructive. Perhaps that explains why Lee and other Revolutionary officers who became Federalists prized peace more than they did liberty. Nor did they yearn for peace as the moral alternative to killing and plundering. Rather, they cherished it for the prosperity it brings in its wake. They wanted a strong centralized government that could crush dissent or anything else threatening their peace and their prosperity.

It was their prosperity, and theirs alone, because they grew rich thanks to protectionist laws and state-sanctioned enterprises. Without the fairness the market decrees, without its channeling of self-interest for the good of all, their fortunes piled up at others’ expense. Predictably, those others protested, sometimes violently, destroying the peace that centralizers considered essential to prosperity. Neither Lee nor his fellows appreciated the irony.

One of those state-sanctioned enterprises combined with centralizing politics to spawn the Constitutional Convention. Lee and other Revolutionary heroes, including George Washington, had invested with the Potomac Company. This enterprise hoped to dig canals around the Great Falls in the Potomac River. Theoretically, the river could then carry trade from the country’s interior to the east—trade currently floating down the Mississippi and enriching western merchants. As Lee wrote Washington, “[N]o event comprehends more fully the strength and future consequence of our particular country than the cementing to the interest of Virginia by the strong tie of commerce the western world.”

But Mississippi merchants and waterfalls were not the only obstacles to the company’s dreams. There were also Daniel Shays and the farmers of western Massachusetts, most of whom were Revolutionary veterans. These men could not pay the taxes their new state had imposed and were losing their homes to foreclosure. They defended themselves by shutting down, from September 1786 through the first weeks of 1787, the courts that were evicting them.

They also freed imprisoned debtors. Not surprisingly, this alarmed creditors. There hadn’t been much love lost between the farmers and their creditors in the first place, but freeing folks who owed them money increased creditors’ zest for portraying the rebels as deadbeats, determined to defraud not only the state but honest merchants as well.

The centralizers insisted Shays and his “lawless banditti” would destroy the country. They magnified the revolt into a threat imperiling not only Massachusetts’s politicians but the whole of American civilization. Lee had “new information” that the “insurgents” were “forming connexions with their neighboring states and the Vermontese.” In case “the Vermontese” weren’t scary enough, Lee trotted out the biggest bogeyman of all: “We have authentic information that they contemplate a re-union with G. Britain. . . .” Massachusetts jurist James Sullivan thought that “all our fine-spun ideas of democratical governments being founded in the virtue of the people are vanished, and . . . we find Americans like other people obliged by force only to yield obedience to the laws.” John and Abigail Adams were in London now while John represented America at the British court, but distance did not improve their perspective. Abigail, too, thought Shays and his farmers would “shear” America’s “glory” and “blast” its “laurels. “Is it a trifling matter to destroy a government?” she asked her sister. “Will my countrymen justify the maxim of tyrants, that mankind are not made for freedom?”

Centralizers confused a refusal to pay taxes with lawlessness and immorality. But Americans had not taken to murdering one another in the streets, nor were they clubbing the weak and elderly over their heads for their wallets. Instead, men who had fought hard against taxation were doing so again, though the tax-gatherers were on their own side of the Atlantic this time. But the centralizers were too busy wringing their hands over the breakdown of society to grasp this distinction.

Centralizers also conflated liberty and government, so that threats to government were threats to liberty. “Instead of that laudable spirit which you approve,” Abigail Adams wrote Thomas Jefferson, “which makes a people watchful over their liberties and alert in defense of them, these mobbish insurgents are for sapping the foundation and destroying the whole fabric at once.” Harry Lee drew the obvious centralizing lesson. “A continuance of our present feeble political form is pregnant with daily evils & must drive us at last to a change.” Clearly, the country would never survive without a strong central government.

Constitutional Convention

And so the shareholders clamored for a convention to “revise” the Articles of Confederation. Lee opined that “the imbecility of the Confederation” was a “defective system which can never make us happy at home nor respectable abroad.” The country needed a state strong enough to make it wealthy. Patrick Henry thundered back, “You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured.”

Sadly, investors were more interested in securing their profits than their liberties. They claimed that the confederated government under the Articles was too weak to smash Shays and other protesters—despite the fact that militia dispersed the rebelling farmers in February 1787.

Thanks to their scare tactics and prestige, the shareholders got their convention as well as a Constitution authorizing a centralized government. With its power to tax, that government could crush anyone defying its edicts: according to the Coast Guard, the first Congress established the service expressly “to enforce tariff and trade laws, prevent smuggling, and protect the collection of the Federal revenue.”

In 1794 the fledgling federal government taxed whiskey and provoked another rebellion. This time it was farmers in western Pennsylvania who took up arms. And this time, too, Federalists mistook a tax protest for lawlessness: “If we permit our laws to be violated with impunity,” Lee reasoned, “farewel to order farewel to liberty & all the political happiness we enjoy.”

Most farmers in the rebelling counties distilled their grain for easier transportation to market. They resented a tax on their profits as much as Potomac Company investors resented political unrest and its threat to theirs. Like Shays’ rebels, many of these were veterans who had warred against taxes 20 years earlier, just as Harry Lee had. Lee even admitted that taxing whiskey was bad policy. Yet when President Washington ordered 13,000 militia from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia to march against the rebels, Lee sought the command. He justified this as the Federalists usually did: he equated liberty with government. That turned the protest into a “wicked & daring attempt to destroy our government & with it our liberty.”

But it was Lee whose “wicked & daring attempt to destroy . . . our liberty” sent troops estimated at double the farmers’ numbers marching against them. Rumors of this overwhelming force scattered the rebels long before the army arrived, so thoroughly that soldiers had to hunt some for trial. Federalists gloated. John Adams wrote, “An army of 15,000 militia so easily raised from four states only, to go upon such an enterprise, ought to be a terrible phenomenon to Anti-Federal citizens. . . . Anti-Federalism . . . and rebellion are dropping their heads very much discouraged.”

The Federalist Party of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries roughly resembled today’s Republican Party, with its emphasis on law and order and its defense of authority. Federalists disapproved of the war looming in 1812 for fear of economic disruption. Opposing them was the Republican Party, confusingly enough, founded by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Their members resembled modern Democrats because they were laborers and immigrants. Republicans wanted war with England, especially those Republicans who lived and worked in coastal cities, because the British were impressing sailors and attacking commercial ships at sea, threatening Republican jobs.

The port city of Baltimore was largely Republican, but it was home to a Federalist newspaper, published by Alexander Hanson, with the fence-straddling name Federal Republican. After a handful of incendiary issues, a Republican mob demolished the newspaper’s offices. Then they drove Hanson out of town. He vowed to return with some friends. The arch-Federalist Lee kissed his 5-year-old son, Robert E., goodbye and went to help.

Hanson distributed more copies of his newspaper on July 27, 1812. That summoned the mob. Overwhelmingly outnumbered, the Federalists barricaded themselves inside Hanson’s home. Those within “Fort Hanson” looked to Harry Lee for guidance. After all, Hanson reminded them, this was the hero “who, during the revolutionary war, took possession of a house in which he repelled with only ten men a large body of British Regulars.” Lee named a commander for each room and stationed his “troops” at the windows. They held off their assailants until dark. Then the Republicans stormed the house. That brought out the city’s militia, which escorted the beleaguered Federalists to jail.

The Republicans followed, shouting outside the prison that they would kill its inmates. Then they broke in. The Federalists still had their pistols, yet Lee convinced them not to fire on their attackers. Astoundingly, he advised turning the weapons on one another. This leader who disdained the people, who thought himself and other rulers superior to them, argued “glowingly and with much emphasis” (according to one newspaper) that the Federalists would die by worthy hands that way. The others weren’t willing to go that far. They laid down their guns.

Predictably, the mob beat, stabbed, strangled, and maimed them. The Republicans continued their punishment even after the Federalists lost consciousness. In their pro-war fury, the assailants slit their victims’ cheeks and noses and pried open eyes to pour hot wax into them. Finally, believing that all the Federalists were dead (in reality, only one was), the Republicans left after singing a nationalistic chorus: “We’ll feather and tar every damned British tory/And this is the way for American glory.”

Friends took Lee and the others to a hospital about a mile distant. He never recovered though he lived another six years, crippled with pain and far from home. Convinced that a milder climate helped his “mob injuries,” Lee spent most of that time in the Caribbean. He eventually took a ship to return to his family, but he made it only as far as Georgia and the mansion of his old Revolutionary cohort, Nathanael Greene. “Absorbed in misery & tortured with pain,” as Lee put it, he died there on March 25, 1818, a cautionary tale for all who trust in the state.

The Declaration of Independence reflected a generation of thinking on the subject of natural rights—“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Constitution later separated the powers of government to protect life, liberty, and property from future encroachments by potential tyrants.

Woodrow Wilson had only limited use for the Founders and the Declaration. “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence,” Wilson urged, “do not read the preface.” Government did not exist merely to protect rights. Instead, Wilson argued that the Declaration “expressly leaves to each generation of men the determination of what they will do with their lives. . . . In brief, political liberty is the right of those who are governed to adjust the government to their own needs and interests.” “We are not,” Wilson insisted, “bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.”

The limited government enshrined in both the Declaration and the Constitution may have been an advance for the Founders, Wilson conceded, but society had evolved since then. The modern state of the early 1900s was “beneficent” and “indispensable.” Separation of powers hindered modern governments from promoting progress. “[T]he only fruit of dividing power,” Wilson asserted, “was to make it irresponsible.”

A better “constitutional government,” Wilson urged, was one “whose powers have been adapted to the interests of its people.” A strong executive was needed, he believed, to translate the interests of the people into public policy. The president was the opinion leader, the “spokesman for the real sentiment and purpose of the country.” And what the country needed was “a man who will be and who will seem to the country in some sort of an embodiment of the character and purpose it wishes its government to have—a man who understood his own day and the needs of his country.”

In the White House, Wilson intended to be a strong president working with a “living Constitution.” He promoted the expanding of “beneficent” government into new areas. In his second year as president he concluded that shipping rates were too high, and he blessed his secretary of treasury’s plan to regulate overseas shipping rates and the companies doing the shipping. Later he promoted a plan to make loans to farmers at federally subsidized rates. Then he pushed through Congress a bill fixing an eight-hour day for railroad workers.

Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution gives no power to the federal government to regulate the prices of trade, the hours of work, or to make special loans to farmers or any other group. But Wilson said he was operating with a “living Constitution” and that increased government in these cases reflected appropriately the greater will of the people. Likewise, when Wilson helped centralize banking with the Federal Reserve system and when he further restricted trade by promoting the Clayton Antitrust Act, he believed that this work for the general good outweighed any loyalties to the rigid construction set up by the Founders in the original Constitution.

Not all Americans agreed with Wilson ‘s evolving Constitution. The Adamson Act, which required the eight-hour day for railroad workers, was challenged and went to the Supreme Court. It was sustained by a 5–4 majority, but Justice William Day was appalled at the constitutional violations in the bill. “Such legislation, it seems to me,” Day said, “amounts to the taking of the property of one and giving it to another in violation of the spirit of fair play and equal right which the Constitution intended to secure in the due process clause to all coming within its protection.”

Such growth of government came with a cost, but Wilson was ready with the progressive income tax to pay for his new programs. World War I clearly influenced Wilson’s use of the tax and his centralization of power—he promoted an increase in the top tax rate from 7 to 15 percent in 1916; then, during the war, Wilson secured an increase to a 77 percent marginal rate on the country’s largest incomes.

Where Wilson supported an evolving Constitution that gave him authority to increase the power of government and centralize power, President Calvin Coolidge, who was on the ticket that succeeded Wilson, believed that the Declaration and the Constitution should be accepted as the Founders wrote them.

In July 1926, on the sesquicentennial of the signing of the Declaration, Coolidge gave a speech reaffirming the need for limited government. “It is not so much then for the purpose of undertaking to proclaim new theories and principles that this annual celebration is maintained, but rather to reaffirm and reestablish those old theories and principles which time and the unerring logic of events have demonstrated to be sound.”

Coolidge added that “there is a finality” about the Declaration. “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary.”

Coolidge’s attitude as president reflected his belief in the ideas of the Declaration. He was not always consistent—for example, he signed the Fordney-McCumber Tariff in 1922, which slapped high and uneven taxes on some needed imports. But his efforts were largely in the direction of reducing the size of government to increase liberty. For example, Coolidge cut the size of government and was the last president to have budget surpluses every year of his presidency. Also, when the Harding-Coolidge administration came into office in 1921, the tax rate on top incomes was 73 percent; when Coolidge left the presidency eight years later it was 25 percent. The rates on the lowest incomes were also slashed.

Attacked Special Interests

Furthermore, Coolidge often attacked special interests. He vetoed a bill to give a special cash bonus to veterans; and, through President Harding, he was part of the administration that shut down a government-operated steel plant set up by Wilson, which had lost money each year of its operation.

Not once but twice Coolidge courageously vetoed the McNary-Haugen farm bill, which was popular with farmers because it promised federal price supports for them. “I do not believe,” Coolidge wrote, “that upon serious consideration the farmers of America would tolerate the precedent of a body of men chosen solely by one industry who, acting in the name of the government, shall arrange for contracts which determine prices, secure the buying and selling of commodities, the levying of taxes on that industry, and pay losses on foreign dumping of any surplus.”

When presidents are faithful to America ‘s founding documents, limited government has a chance to flourish. But when presidents emote over a “living” Declaration and Constitution, then the growth of government is upon us.

How often do we hear the claim that our nation is a democracy? Was a democratic form of government the vision of the Founders? As it turns out, the word democracy appears nowhere in the two most fundamental founding documents of our nation—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Instead of a democracy, the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4, declares “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” Our pledge of allegiance to the flag says not to “the democracy for which it stands,” but to “the republic for which it stands.” Is the song that emerged during the War of 1861 “The Battle Hymn of the Democracy” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”?

So what is the difference between republican and democratic forms of government? John Adams captured the essence of the difference when he said, “You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.” Nothing in our Constitution suggests that government is a grantor of rights. Instead, government is envisioned as a protector of rights.

In recognition that it is government that poses the gravest threat to our liberties, the framers used negative phrases in reference to Congress throughout the first ten amendments to the Constitution, such as shall not abridge, infringe, deny, disparage, and shall not be violated, nor be denied. In a republican form of government, there is rule of law. All citizens, including government officials, are accountable to the same laws. Government power is limited and decentralized through a system of checks and balances. Government intervenes in civil society to protect its citizens against force and fraud, but does not intervene in the cases of peaceable, voluntary exchange.

Contrast the framers’ vision of a republic with that of a democracy. According to Webster’s dictionary, a democracy is defined as “government by the people; especially: rule of the majority.” In a democracy the majority rules either directly or through its elected representatives. As in a monarchy, the law is whatever the government determines it to be. Laws do not represent reason. They represent power. The restraint is upon the individual instead of government. Unlike the rights envisioned under a republican form of government, rights in a democracy are seen as privileges and permissions that are granted by government and can be rescinded by government.

There is considerable evidence that demonstrates the disdain held by our founders for a democracy. James Madison, in Federalist No. 10, said that in a pure democracy, “there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph said, “that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.” John Adams said, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Later on, Chief Justice John Marshall observed, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.” In a word or two, the Founders knew that a democracy would lead to the same kind of tyranny the colonies suffered under King George III.

The framers gave us a Constitution that is replete with anti-majority-rule, undemocratic mechanisms. One that has come in for frequent criticism and calls for elimination is the Electoral College. In their wisdom, the framers gave us the Electoral College so that in presidential elections large, heavily populated states could not use their majority to run roughshod over small, sparsely populated states. Amending the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress, or two-thirds of state legislatures, to propose an amendment and three-fourths of state legislatures to ratify it. Part of the reason for having a bicameral Congress is that it places another obstacle to majority rule. Fifty-one senators can block the wishes of 435 representatives and 49 senators. The Constitution gives the president a veto to thwart the power of all 535 members of Congress. It takes two-thirds of both houses of Congress to override the president’s veto.

There is even a simpler way to expose the tyranny of majority rule. Ask yourself how many of your day-to-day choices would you like to have settled through the democratic process of majority rule. Would you want the kind of car you own to be decided through a democratic process, or would you prefer purchasing any car you please? Would like your choice of where to live, what clothes to purchase, what foods you eat, or what entertainment you enjoy to be decided through a democratic process? I am sure that at the mere suggestion that these choices should be subject to a democratic vote, most of us would deem it a tyrannical attack on our liberties.

Most Americans see our liberties as protected by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, but that vision was not fully shared by its framers. In Federalist No. 84, Alexander Hamilton argued, “[B]ills of rights . . . are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. For why declare that things shall not be done [by Congress] which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given [to Congress] by which restrictions may be imposed?” James Madison agreed: “This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard urged against the admission of a bill of rights into this system . . . [because] by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration, and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the general government, and were consequently insecure.”

Madison thought this danger could be guarded against by the Ninth Amendment, which declares “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Of course, the Ninth Amendment has little or no meaning in today’s courts.

Transformed into a Democracy

Do today’s Americans have contempt for the republican values laid out by our Founders, or is it simply a matter of our being unschooled about the differences between a republic and a democracy? It appears that most Americans, as well as their political leaders, believe that Congress should do anything it can muster a majority vote to do. Thus we have been transformed into a democracy. The most dangerous and insidious effect of majority rule is that it confers an aura of legitimacy, decency, and respectability on acts that would otherwise be deemed tyrannical. Liberty and democracy are not synonymous and could actually be opposites.

If we have become a democracy, I guarantee you that the Founders would be deeply disappointed by our betrayal of their vision. They intended, and laid out the ground rules for, a limited republican form of government that saw the protections of personal liberties as its primary function.