Still, if that’s what you think, you’re wrong.

The latest entry in the genre, Thomas Woods and Kevin Gutzman’s Who Killed the Constitution?, is something different. It’s well worth your while.

Unlike some other writers, Woods and Gutzman don’t just place the blame for our present situation on a handful of bad Supreme Court decisions. Instead, they show how, in the twentieth century, all three branches of the federal government have spun out of control, completely abandoning any pretense that the Constitution constrains them at all.

Woods and Gutzman demonstrate how the executive branch claims virtually unlimited power. President George W. Bush damaged the constitutional fabric significantly, and the authors demolish the dubious constitutional scholarship of Bush’s court intellectual, law professor John Yoo. They point out, too, that presidents never have trouble finding “scholars” like Yoo to rationalize their power grabs.

But the authors also show that Bush did not do much of anything new. All presidents since at least Harry Truman have assumed they could make war without a declaration from Congress. In fact, most presidents since Theodore Roosevelt have assumed, as he did, that they can do anything they want in the absence of a specific constitutional restriction on their power. (Gene Healy’s recent book, The Cult of the Presidency, reviewed in the March Freeman, offers much additional detail on this subject.)

A Litany of Abuses

One chapter in particular illustrates this by exposing one of the worst, but most overlooked, government crimes in U.S. history: Franklin Roosevelt’s confiscation of everyone’s gold. This discussion also gives the authors an opportunity to offer an important bit of economic education as they explain why gold was used as money in the first place.

You might expect the chapter titled “Roads to Nowhere” to offer a familiar list of pork-barrel projects funded by Congress. Instead, the authors show that the federal government shouldn’t be funding roads at all, no matter where those roads go. Early presidents assumed they would need a constitutional amendment to fund “infrastructure” projects. Unfortunately, today they just assume it’s within their power and that assumption goes unchallenged.

Other chapters explore topics such as the Commerce Clause, which the courts have used to justify almost anything Congress does; the military draft, which violates the Constitution’s prohibition of slavery; presidential “signing statements” (written pronouncements by a president on signing a bill, often with the intent to modify the statute and especially to nullify its application to the executive branch), and President Truman’s attempt to nationalize the steel industry.

Two of the boldest chapters deal with what the authors call the “third rail of American jurisprudence”—Brown v. Board of Education and its aftermath. The authors show how Brown had no basis in the Constitution—and that the Supreme Court justices behind the decision knew it. Yes, the book’s authors actually say it: the Fourteenth Amendment’s text does not actually prohibit school segregation.

Even if that’s so, why attack this sacred cow when most everyone today opposes segregation anyway? Because if the Supreme Court can so utterly disregard the Constitution and the very idea of law in this decision to reach its own policymaking goals, then there really is no Constitution to speak of anymore. And that’s the point. As they say in their introduction, “the Constitution is dead.”

Beyond Redemption

Refreshingly, they don’t argue that the Constitution might be revived by electing the right people or bringing the right lawsuits. Indeed, they even suggest that our sorry result might have been inevitable—not only with this particular Constitution, but with any written constitution. After all, what do you expect will happen when you let federal officials determine the limits of the federal government’s power? That’s true regardless of who’s in office, or what they might say before being elected. Woods and Gutzman write: “People in power exercise all the power they can get, even after they have howled in the wilderness against legislating judges, imperial presidents, and the death of states’ rights.”

The authors also quote Lysander Spooner, who put the problem best when he wrote in the nineteenth century that the Constitution “has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”

After years of being shunned and even persecuted, Christians suddenly enjoyed the official blessing of the Roman state when Emperor Constantine came to power in 324 A.D. For the first time, imperial funds were used to subsidize priests and churches. Christians emerged from hiding in Rome’s catacombs to partake of the state’s largess. A faith that might have saved an empire was thus corrupted and in the end proved to be a futile safeguard against Rome’s ultimate destruction at the hands of barbarians a century and a half later.

Indeed, before the barbarians arrived in 476, Emperor Julian launched a backlash against state-supported Christian influence in 361. He crippled the church by withdrawing the financial aid on which it had become dependent, and even forbade Christians from teaching in the schools. Because the Roman state was paying the Christian piper, it eventually called most of the tunes.

For the sake of both their faith and Roman society at large, the Christians of the fourth century should have remained pure and independent—advice expressed well 13 centuries later by the English poet John Dryden: “better shun the bait than struggle in the snare.”

President Bush is right to recognize the fruitful role of America’s private, faith-based “armies of compassion.” For many reasons, such groups are far more effective in solving social problems—poverty, homelessness, illiteracy, to name a few—than are government programs and bureaucracies. They treat the whole person, which means they get to the root of problems that stem from spiritual, attitudinal, and behavioral deficiencies. They demand accountability, which means they don’t simply hand over a check every two weeks without expecting the needy to do much in return or to change destructive patterns of behavior. And if they don’t produce results, they wither; the parishioners or others who voluntarily support them will put their mites elsewhere.

When a government program fails to perform, its lobbyists make a case for more money and they usually get it. Literally tens of thousands of faith-based organizations, large and small, that demonstrate every day in America what management expert Peter Drucker once said of nonprofit agencies in the private sector: They “spend far less for results than governments spend for failure.”

In a single pithy question, John Fund of the Wall Street Journal underscored the instinctive, gut-level regard that Americans have for private aid, no matter what they may say in public: “If you had a financial windfall and wanted to help the poor, would you even think about giving time or a check to the government?” Millions of Americans give to the Red Cross and the Salvation Army; almost nobody writes checks to the welfare department.

President Bush’s initiative would “pioneer a new model of cooperation,” in part through federal contracts with faith-based groups to provide a wide range of social services. The problem with it is not, as some critics argue, that it puts faith in a position to corrupt the government. All the ingredients necessary for corruption in government are already there: vast sums of other people’s money and far more power than any government should ever have.

Government Corrupts

The real problem with the President’s initiative is the same as was manifested painfully in ancient Rome—government will be in a position to corrupt faith. The fact that the modern American state is relentlessly secular is one reason, but not the primary one. Resting as it does on the compulsory tax power, government funding of any kind, by its nature, is at odds with the very thing that makes private faith-based programs work: impulses that are entirely voluntary and inner-motivated.

From start to finish, what private charities do is a manifestation of free will. No one is compelled to provide assistance. No one is coerced to pay for it. No one is required to accept it. All parties come together of their own individual volition. And that’s the magic of it. The link connecting the giver, the provider, and the receiver is strong precisely because each knows he can walk away at the slightest hint of insincerity, broken promises, or poor performance. Because each party is giving of his own time or resources voluntarily, he tends to focus on the mission at hand and doesn’t get bogged down or diverted by distant or secondary agendas, like filling out the proper paperwork or currying favor with the political powers that be.

Most people of faith—whether they be Christian, Jew, Muslim, or something else—would ordinarily be the first to argue that God doesn’t need federal funds to do His work; just a change of heart will do, one heart at a time. Sadly, there are more than a few people of faith who have succumbed to temptation and are arguing that their organizations now must take advantage of the Bush proposal or else precious lives will not be turned around. That the mere offer of future funding is enough to turn some eyes to Washington that previously were aimed somewhat higher suggests a subtle corruption of faith has already begun.

The administration argues that it will scrupulously avoid any direct support of actual religious activities. It will fund the bed a homeless person sleeps in, not the Bible his Salvation Army mentor reads to him. But as government and private funds flow into the same pot, it may be very hard to follow what flows out of it and for what purpose, without a smothering paper burden to guarantee what the politicians call “accountability.”

In Michigan, the Salvation Army accepts tax money to supplement the private donations it collects for taking care of the homeless. In 1995, the city of Detroit imposed a 25-page ordinance to make sure that shelters like those run by the Army are up to snuff. It requires, among other things, that all staffers be trained in resident complaint and grievance procedures and that all meal menus be approved by a dietitian registered with the American Dietetic Association—“minor” diversions from the spiritual mission of the Army, but all intended “for the public good,” to be sure.

Advocates for the Bush proposal argue that this administration’s people in government will not burden faith-based charities with that kind of do-gooder bureaucratic rigmarole. But its people will not always be there. Those Romans who thought they had a friend in Constantine were undoubtedly more than a little upset with Julian.