Blog: Blame the Founding Fathers for Leviathan
“This, Sir, is my great objection to the Constitution, that there is no true responsibility — and that the preservation of our liberty depends on the single chance of men being virtuous enough to make laws to punish themselves.”
Patrick henry
Often, people lament that if only the masses were educated, motivated, and had forced politicians to follow the Constitution, the government could have been restrained to its rightful role of upholding liberty. It should be obvious how unlikely even 1 of these things is to occur, let alone all 3.
So, if the framers built a political apparatus that failed to take into account, or relied upon masses of people acting in unlikely ways, then those framers bear at least a portion of the responsibility for what that political body becomes. After all, they were the ones who first empowered it and set it in motion.
Patrick Henry got it right when he identified the folly in the creation of what was to become the most powerful government the world has ever seen; a government which incarcerates an unprecedented portion of its citizens, lays claim to whatever portion of its citizen’s income it likes, and enforces its will upon peoples around the globe.
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About The Author
Andrew Kern
Andrew Kern is the author of The Myth of the Social Contract: Refuting Common Arguments for Government Authority, and he has written on libertarianism, anarchism, and private alternatives to state authority. He founded The Principled Libertarian website in 2017, with the goal of spreading the ideas of liberty and helping to define what it means to be free. His work has been published by Antiwar.com, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, Being Libertarian, among others.