By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission
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Last annotated on September 1, 2016
I think that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world.… The supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. —ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in AmericaRead more at location 55
The twin propositions of this book are that we are at the end of the American project as the founders intended it, but that opportunities are opening for preserving the best qualities of the American project in a new incarnation.Read more at location 79
By the American project I mean the continuing effort, begun with the founding, to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals, families, and communities to live their lives as they see fit as long as they accord the same freedom to everyone else, with government safeguarding a peaceful setting for those endeavors but otherwise standing aside.Read more at location 81
What made America unique first blurred, then faded, and is now almost gone.Read more at location 91
The federal government is genuinely powerful, as it should be, when it comes to tasks such as defending the nation. But when it comes to micromanaging the lives of more than 300 million people, government is the Wizard of Oz: fearsome when its booming voice is directed against any single target, but, when the curtain is pulled aside, revealed as impotent to impose its will in the face of widespread refusal to comply with its rules. Part II describes practical strategies for taking advantage of this weakness, using the resources of the private sector to nullify rules that arbitrarily and capriciously interfere with ordinary people trying to live their lives as they see fit.Read more at location 95
THE MIDDLE of the twentieth century, the concept of limited government seemed moribund. Americans still called their nation the “land of the free,” but hardly anything was said about the dream of the founders, in which “the sum of good government,” as Thomas Jefferson expressed it in his first inaugural address, is one that “shall restrain men from injuring one another [and] shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.”Read more at location 128
Just four years later, the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater,Read more at location 146
The venerable American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institution, and Foundation for Economic Education were joined by the Heritage Foundation in 1973 (Joseph Coors provided the seed money), the Cato Institute in 1976 (marking Charles Koch’s entry into the policy world), the Manhattan Institute in 1978 (Antony Fisher and William Casey), and the Pacific Research Institute in 1979 (Antony Fisher and James North).Read more at location 169
Irving Kristol’s The Public Interest and Norman Podhoretz’s CommentaryRead more at location 178
Meanwhile, the intellectual wing of liberalism was digging itself into the humorless and impossibly abstruse schools of postmodernism and semiotics, explaining every conceivable topic with the new holy trinity of the left: race, class, and gender.Read more at location 189
In terms of excitement and optimism, the Reagan years from 1981 through 1988 saw the apogee of the limited-government movement.Read more at location 193
Today, rigorous Madisonian policy analysis is prominent in almost any important policy debate. The nation’s leading law faculties include Madisonian constitutional scholars. Free-market economists are represented in the economics departments of the nation’s elite universities. In the popular culture, talk radio and the Fox television network abound in spokespersons for Madisonian ideas. By objective measures, the last fifty years have seen Madisonian thought emerge from obscurity to prominence and influence.Read more at location 200
The resurgence of Madisonian thought also coincided with unprecedented—actually, previously unimaginable—growth in the size and reach of government.Read more at location 204
In 1963, the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations was about the same as it had been at the end of World War II. From 1963 through 1968, the code increased by an average of 5,537 pages per year.[Read more at location 207
The government’s continuing expansion doesn’t mean that the resurgence in Madisonian thought had no effects. On the contrary, the resurgence made a big difference in terms of discrete policy issues. Crime is no longer a national issue, as it was during the 1970s and 1980s, in large part because of scholars and activists on the right whose work revolutionized policing and imprisonment policy.Read more at location 260
Such scholars and activists were instrumental in producing the welfare reform act of 1996 and the large drop in the welfare rolls that followed.Read more at location 263
Scholars and activists on the right energized the school-choice and deregulatory movements.Read more at location 264
Free-market economists have over the last half century established the superiority of capitalism in generating wealth, with immeasurable effects on sustaining capitalism (which had been losing ground before the Madisonian resurgence) and reducing poverty throughout the world.Read more at location 265
Similar observations could be made about the positive effects of efforts from the right that dealt with taxes,Read more at location 267
We have won battles, but we are losing the war. It’s time to open a new front.Read more at location 270
