Was the Bill of Rights an error? It is debatable. If you recall, the NY delegation insisted on it.
Every time I find myself slipping into the modern statist mindset, the assumptions of which dominate so much political discourse, I try to step back and remind myself that the American experiment was not so much about instituting specific rights for individuals as it was about limiting the power and rights of the Federal state, leaving all the rest of the power to individual people (or the individual states and localities).
The problem with the Bill of Rights is that it makes it appear that those are the peoples' delimited rights. They even decided to stick in the #10, redundantly I think:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
America is not about rights. America is about the locus of power and self-determination. In other words, the government has (or had) strictly limited rights and powers. That sort of freedom from government was the whole point. Rights are for peasants and serfs, grasping for crumbs of freedom and autonomy or, in the "positive rights" lingo, grasping for freebies. American government was meant to be in handcuffs while we, the people, led our lives freely, and as we thought best.
Over time, political freedom has expanded in some ways: emancipation of slaves, women's suffrage. In other ways, the growth of the would-be leviathan state has usurped much individual freedom - albeit with the consent of the people who seek benefit from its growing power and wealth.
The Libertarian side of me would love to see "a new birth of freedom." Who is the greatest enemy of freedom from state power? Us - the voters, who have consistently for 100 years been willing to trade a birthright for a bowl of lentils.
Says Knish:
The left believes strongly in social solutions. It believes that all our ills are social in nature and that social justice can only be practiced by a healthy society. Their idea of a healthy society is totalitarian but they have that in common with most ideologues who want a perfect state, rather than a free state.
Our idea of perfection is good old messy individual freedom and responsibility.
Barone today quoted the stunningly perspicacious de Toqueville:
"Thus, taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrial animals of which the government is the shepherd."
That is what House Republicans are fighting to reverse.
Painting is a young George Washington, by Peale
