Of Limited Freedom and Limited Government

I live and work near the belly of the beast, and I can report that these days he is not happy. His belly is rumbling. He has eaten more than he can digest. Watch out, he may throw up. He is already belching.

The federal government is not working, we know and see. Not only is it not working as was intended when it was created by the States, it is not working as designed and over designed in subsequent years. The federal government cannot manage the national parks, the welfare system is breaking down, the national transportation infrastructure takes in more money and yet the signs of dysfunction and decay on roads, rails, and bridges are increasingly apparent. Banks are regulated with thousands of rules while the banking industry continues to shrink: we have fewer banks today than we did in 1891, and their share of the financial markets has been dwindling for decades. So much of what the federal government touches turns to rust and ruin.

Yet the federal government keeps reaching out for more, undeterred by its failures. The Environmental Protection Agency aggressively imposes restrictions on the air we exhale, the Food and Drug Administration announces plans to control the fat in our foods, the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection has decided what kind of mortgages lenders can make and what kind of people can get them (acknowledging that many who qualify today will be outside the boundaries of federal standards in 2014).

You can augment this brief sampling of a longer list from your own experiences. This is nothing new, other than perhaps in frequency and intensity. If there is a virtue in Obamacare it may be that its unworkability and its increasingly universal hurt are demonstrating broadly what many have been feeling individually.

Demonstrating the hurt is not the same as redressing it. The beast, however ill, will not cheerfully surrender its prey. During the debate over ratification of the Constitution, one commenter, writing in the Philadelphia newspaper Independent Gazetteer (October 12, 1787), observed, “People once possessed of power are always loth to part with it”, and then warned that the Feds could not be counted on, by their own volition, to do “any thing which shall derogate from their own authority and importance . . . or give back to the people any part of those privileges which they have once parted with”. If that was predictable in 1787, it is painfully apparent today. Perhaps the clearest example is how the Washington power elites have exempted themselves and their cronies from the application of Obamacare while continuing to inflict it on the rest.

And yet, Obamacare is the hurt that keeps on hurting. People will not get over it or get used to it. Its pain and suffering will be felt again and again with each new illness, every new tax, as its strictures reduce availability, affordability, and quality of wellbeing. Wave after wave of new harm will come, astonishing its supporters and augmenting the ranks of its victims until it is addressed.

Americans, much like other people, will put up with much before they are roused to action. Unlike for many other people, our Constitution gives us avenues for action. The Constitution embodies the concept of continual redress within the rule of law to make appeal to extremities outside of the rule of law unnecessary and unthinkable, so long as the principles of the Constitution retain their vitality.

The core principle of the Constitution is limited government, designed to protect the growth and expansion of human freedom. Increasingly, for about a century, the “progressives” in Washington have turned public affairs on their heads. Human freedom has been the focus of limitation, while government enjoyed constant growth and expansion. The end seems approaching, either of the ability of government to manage what it has taken on, or perhaps (and hopefully) when the holders of power can no longer convince enough people that it is all for their own good. Limitation on government may return in vogue as promises of government solutions to feed the beast ring ever more hollow.

The Philadelphia writer of 1787, whom I cited above, was a critic of the Constitution, because he believed it impossible that the power gathered in by the federal government could be wrested from its hands. I remain hopeful that it still can be. Nothing else will work.