The chapters of Part II propose a program of systematic civil disobedience underwritten by privately funded legal resistance to the regulatory state.Read more at location 2249
This program’s first objective is to defend ordinary individuals against government overreach, even if it accomplishes nothing else. Its secondary objective is to make large portions of the Code of Federal Regulations de facto unenforceable. Its tertiary objective is to provoke specific, plausible Supreme Court interpretations of existing law that could transform the way that regulations are created and enforced.Read more at location 2250
In which I present two cases for concluding that the federal government has lost its authority to command voluntary compliance with its vast edifice of laws.Read more at location 2256
American government does not command our blind allegiance to the law. It is part of our national catechism that government is instituted to protect our unalienable rights, and that when it becomes destructive of those rights, the reason for our allegiance is gone.Read more at location 2261
in Europe has rested on ties of ethnicity and culture, faith in the rulers, loyalty to the rule of law, or combinations of the above.Read more at location 2272
It was grounded in John Locke’s argument that, in a state of nature, all political authority resides in individuals.Read more at location 2276
That transfer must be voluntary; otherwise, the political authority is not legitimate.Read more at location 2278
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” is a restatement of that Lockean position.Read more at location 2280
American patriotism was quite unlike patriotism in other countries. “It is not an instinctive attachment to scenes with which they are acquainted from childhood, or to men to whose familiar converse they are accustomed,” he wrote. “It consists in the love of principles, for which they are ready to make every sacrifice, and which in the outset they preferred to their homes.”4 By principles, Grund meant the principles of libertyRead more at location 2285
Tocqueville made a similar point about Americans’ passionate belief that their liberty to pursue their own interests without hindrance was the key to making America work—the principle that he labeled “self-interest rightly understood.”Read more at location 2292
I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering.… The lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people. The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.Read more at location 2304
Judged by that standard, the federal government lost its legitimacy in theory during the constitutional revolution of 1937–1942, lost its legitimacy in practice during the 1960s, and it has been downhill ever since.Read more at location 2322
A More Pragmatic Case for Lost LegitimacyRead more at location 2326
Since 1958, pollsters have periodically asked exactly the same question of representative samples of Americans: “How much of the time do you think you can trust government in Washington to do what is right: Just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time?”Read more at location 2331
disturbed by laws that are so complicated, they are impossible to obey;Read more at location 2342
Washington looks like a sophisticated kleptocracy—inRead more at location 2348
The first tacit compact was that the American people wouldn’t expect much from the federal government beyond protection of their freedom at home and from enemies abroad.Read more at location 2360
Kennedy administration still had no significant role in K–12 education, local law enforcement, or health care.Read more at location 2363
The second tacit compact was that the federal government would not unilaterally impose a position on the moral disputes that divided Americans.Read more at location 2368
This was exemplified by the dispute over slavery, the most divisive of all American moral disputes.Read more at location 2369
The third tacit compact was that the federal government would make it easy for Americans to take pride in themselves. Americans who made an honest living, took care of their families, and didn’t bother anyone else were good Americans—as good as the highest in the land. Elected officials constantly said so and, until the 1960s, the federal government didn’t ask more than that in practice. It’s easy to trust a federal government that validates your good opinion of yourself.Read more at location 2378
When the government creates a Federal Emergency Management Agency—slow and inept, as so many government agencies are—it gets blamed for the catastrophe in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. That New Orleans was built below the level of the Mississippi RiverRead more at location 2385
By imposing federal policies on abortion, affirmative action, drug use, education, employment, expressions of religious faith, marriage, and welfare, the federal government has alienated large numbers of Americans from all points on the political spectrum.Read more at location 2391
“to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical.”Read more at location 2393
In summary, I am arguing that the federal government over the last half century has separated itself from the American people in a way it had never done before.Read more at location 2410
The federal government has become an entity distinct from our conception of America, with agendas that have nothing to do with serving the American people and everything to do with the health and well-being of the federal government itself.Read more at location 2412
The civil disobedience I propose is against a government that has over five decades earned our distrust.Read more at location 2420
