Liberty vs. Benevolence

Roger Kimball has an excellent essay up at the New Criterion.

Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep government limited, unintrusive: A system of constraints on power to keep politics and government secondary to the important things in life, the true sources of value found only in family and faith.

—Ronald Reagan

The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm. Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does great evil. It augments so much vice, it multiplies so much suffering, it brings to life such great populations to suffer and to be vicious, that it is open to argument whether it be or be not an evil to the world, and this is entirely because excellent people fancy they can do much by rapid action—that they will most benefit the world when they most relieve their own feelings.

—Walter Bagehot

Any discussion of “The Wisdom of the Founders” and the ideal of limited government has to begin by acknowledging a certain irony. [1] There is no doubt that the Founders were deeply concerned to protect individual and states’ rights against the prerogatives of the federal government. For example, James Madison, in Federalist 45, explicitly declared that the powers delegated by the Constitution to the federal government were “few and defined,” having to do mostly with “external objects” like war, peace, and foreign commerce. The powers delegated to the individual states, however, were “numerous and indefinite,” extending, said Madison, to “all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” Think about that the next time you try to start a business, choose (or refuse) health care insurance, plan for your retirement, or, indeed, buy an incandescent light bulb. The insinuation of the federal government into the interstices of everyday life over the last several decades is something that would have appalled the Founders and confirmed Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous analysis of democratic despotism.

Still, it is worth acknowledging that the Founders, although deeply concerned with limiting the sphere of government power, were also determined to forge a strong and effective federal government. The Federalist, after all, took aim at the abundant anti-Federalist commentary that opposed the proposed U.S. Constitution precisely because, so thought the anti-Federalists, it arrogated too much power to a central authority at the expense of the states. But just this, the Founders argued, was the price of creating and maintaining that “more perfect union” of which the Constitution speaks in its Preamble. “The vigor of government,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in the very first of The Federalist Papers, “is essential to the security of liberty.” The goal, he put it later on in The Federalist, is “a happy mean” which combines “the energy of government with the security of private rights.” As the legal scholar Jeremy Rabkin reminds us in his response below, that energy is particularly critical when it comes to issues of national security and defense. The Manhattan Project was not, and could not have been, a local initiative.

The rest here.