• Tag Archives liberty

  • John Adams on the Purpose of Government

    Posted on by Azrael Comment


    John Adams, who has become “virtually an asterisk in history books today,” in one writer’s words, is inadequately celebrated. He played a leading role in our revolution and the beginnings of constitutional government. He wrote a Stamp Act protest that became a model for other protests. He outlined principles of liberty for Americans on the cusp of independence.

    He helped write the resolutions of May 10, 1776, declaring America independent, and defended the Declaration of Independence before Congress. He composed most of the Massachusetts Constitution (the oldest still in use in the world), acclaimed for its bill of rights. His A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States was often cited in the Constitutional Convention.

    Given Adams’s importance in establishing our country on the basis of liberty, we should remember his advocacy of the rights, or property, that is the content of our liberty and whose defense is the central reason our government was instituted.

    • “Liberties are not the grants of princes and parliaments.”
    • “[People have] rights…antecedent to all earthly governments—rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws.”
    • “Each individual of the society has a right to be protected…in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property…no part of the property of any individual can, with justice, be taken from him, or applied to public uses, without his own consent.”
    • “In a free state, every man…ought to be his own governor.”
    • “To be commanded we do not consent.”
    • “Liberty is [government’s] end.”
    • “In order to have this liberty, it is requisite the government be so constituted… that one citizen need not be afraid of another citizen.”
    • “Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.”
    • “The end of…government is…the power of enjoying, in safety and tranquility, [individuals’] natural rights and the blessings of life.”
    • “[Government]…should be…for the preservation of internal peace, virtue, and good order, as well as the defense of their lives, liberties, and properties.”
    • “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ were not commandments of heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.”
    • “Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.”
    • “Trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”
    • “Liberty must at all hazards be supported.”
    • “A free constitution of civil government cannot be purchased at too dear a rate, as there is nothing on this side of Jerusalem of equal importance to mankind.”
    • “Be not…wheedled out of your liberty by…hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.”

    John Adams, because he recognized “an enemy to liberty [as] an enemy to human nature” and that “nothing is so terrible as the loss of their liberties,” wrote that “It has ever been my hobby-horse to see rising in America an empire of liberty.”

    Reflecting the central importance of liberty, Adams called the debate over the Declaration of Independence “the greatest question…which ever was debated in America.” Thomas Jefferson described his defense as having “a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats.” Delegate Richard Stockton called him “the man to whom the country is most indebted…who…by the force of his reasoning demonstrated not only the justice, but the expediency of the measure.”

    Adams also saw the importance of America’s revolution for the world:

    Objects of the most stupendous magnitude and measure in which the lives and liberties of millions yet unborn are intimately interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of a revolution the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.

    And he made it clear why founding America on liberty was monumental: “Her cause is that of all nations and all men, and it needs nothing but to be explained and approved.” At a time when we often forget that liberty is both America’s rationale and its greatness, Americans would profit from Adams’s wisdom.


    Gary M. Galles

    Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. His recent books include Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies (2014) and Apostle of Peace (2013). He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • The Irony of the Plot to Delay Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate Vote

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Right after Chairman Charles Grassley set a Judiciary Committee vote on Brett Kavanaugh, I read that Democrats were expected to try to delay it until as late as September 27. That was consistent with Democrats’ “leave no stall untried” approach at his hearings and the subsequent Feinstein-FBI finesse. However, that date would also be ironic.

    That is because the date marks publication of the first of the Anti-Federalist Papers in 1789. Meanwhile, Kavanaugh’s opponents are providing proof that the government abuses Anti-Federalists warned of, enabled by the courts, have come to pass.

    Anti-Federalists, whose objections led to the Bill of Rights, feared that the Constitution’s checks would be undermined by expansive court interpretations, enabling a federal government with unwarranted and undelegated powers that were bound to be abused.

    Writing as Brutus in the debates over the Constitution, he asserted that the Supreme Court would become a source of massive abuse because they were beyond the control of “both the people and the legislature.”

    Among the most insightful of the Anti-Federalists was Robert Yates, a New York judge who, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, withdrew because the convention exceeded its authority. Writing as Brutus in the debates over the Constitution, he asserted that the Supreme Court would become a source of massive abuse because they were beyond the control of “both the people and the legislature.”

    Brutus argued that without true constitutional grounds for rulings, the Court would create them “by their own decisions,” through manipulating the meanings of arguably vague clauses. The court would interpret the Constitution according to its alleged “spirit” rather than according to its words (as enumerated rights, spelled out in the Tenth Amendment, would require).

    Brutus predicted that the Supreme Court would adopt “very liberal” principles of interpretation because there had never in history been a court with such “immense powers,” which was perilous for a nation founded on consent of the governed. It could easily empower “creative” rulings with “the force of law,” due to insufficient ability to “control their adjudications” and “correct their errors.” This failing would compound over time in a “silent and imperceptible manner,” through precedents building on one another.

    In summary, Brutus argued that overly broad judicial readings would empower justices to shape the federal government and its limits as they desired over time, regardless of the Constitution’s words, because the Court’s interpretations would remake them. And that would hand the courts the power to be the most dangerous branch, contradicting Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 78 assertion to the contrary. Anyone who knows the history of reinterpretation of the separation of powers, the commerce and takings clauses, and much of the Bill of Rights, among other examples, knows that Brutus was right.

    In our modern “Brutalized” world, among the greatest fears are judges who might move us back toward our Founders’ vision of citizens’ rights and limited federal power, toward treating the Constitution as being a higher law than subsequent distortions.

    Kavanaugh may become such a Justice. That explains Democrats’ “every dirty trick in the book” opposition to seating him and their campaign to make Americans “afraid, very afraid” that Kavanaugh might undermine some of the Constitutional abuses Democrats most wish to retain.

    That is why trying to delay a Senate vote is just another tactic to kill his nomination. But if the irony of the date awakens people to the insights of the Anti-Federalists and the wide variance between Democrats’ desires and citizens’ Constitutional protections, it would provide the further irony of eviscerating their own position.

    Source: The Irony of the Plot to Delay Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate Vote – Foundation for Economic Education



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  • Limits on Power Are Limits on Oppression

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    December 19 marks the birth of John Taylor of Caroline, who remains virtually unknown, despite being called “the most impressive political theorist that America has produced.”

    Taylor, who served in the Continental Army, Virginia Legislature and U.S. Senate, was an Antifederalist, opposed to the overpowering central government he believed the Constitution would create. As F. Thornton Miller put it, “For Taylor, the Constitution was of worth only if it could serve the more fundamental cause of liberty.”

    Taylor defended liberty and states’ rights, advocated a strict interpretation of the Constitution’s terms against federal overreaching, and vigorously opposed government favors and protectionism, which he called “the most efficacious system of tyranny practicable over civilized nations.”  

    Taylor’s positions stand abandoned today. Government has become ever more the dispenser of special treatment at others’ expense. That is why Taylor’s 1822 Tyranny Unmasked merits revisiting.

    Political liberty consists only in a government constituted to preserve and not to defeat the natural capacity of providing for our own good.

    Governments able to do so uniformly sacrifice the national interest to their own.

    As no government can patronize one class but at the expense of others…Is not their discord the universal consequence of the fraudulent power assumed by governments of allotting to classes and individuals indigence or wealth.

    Payments…extorted to feed either an oppressive government or exclusive privileges… degenerate into actual tyranny.

    The only reciprocity produced by [legislative favors] is between the corrupters and corrupted.

    If a man should combine with a government to take away another’s property, the tyranny of the act would not be obliterated by the power of an accomplice.

    The nation which imagines that… government can by provisions convert fraud into honesty relies upon a moral impossibility for the preservation of its liberty.

    Governments, under pretense of supervising the affairs of individuals… enrich themselves and their instruments of oppression.

    The treasure extorted beyond the line of honest frugality is uniformly diverted from the end of defending to that of transferring property.

    The wealth of nations is best secured by allowing every person, as long as he adheres to the rules of justice, to pursue his own interest in his own way.

    Liberty can only be preserved by a frugal government and by excluding frauds for transferring property from one man to another.

    How then is tyranny to be ascertained… except as something which takes away our money, transfers our property and comforts to those who did not earn them, and eats the food belonging to others.

    The transferring policy seems to suppose that the public has no property; and though legislatures have no moral or constitutional right to give one man’s property to another; yet that by combining the property of all men under the appellation “public,” they acquire both a moral and constitutional right to give the property of all men to one man.

    There are two kinds of political economy. One consists of a frugal government, and an encouragement of individuals to earn, by suffering them to use; the other of contrivances for feeding an extravagant government, its parasites and partisans, its sinecures and exclusive privileges… [one] is liberty; the other is tyranny

    Government… founded upon a supposed necessity that men must be robbed of their property to preserve social order… invariably terminates in despotism.

    A government… able to oppress, must… be weak for the object of preserving liberty…Every innovation which weakens the limitations and divisions of power, alone able to make a government strong for the object of preserving liberty, makes it strong for the object of oppression.

    John Taylor of Caroline deserves renewed attention, particularly for his overwhelming arguments derived from what Joseph Stromberg termed “the contrast between those whose property was the creature of political force and fraud and those who earned their property through productive work on the free market.”

    As F. Thornton Miller wrote, “Most of Taylor’s world is gone. But, with the continued increase in the power of the federal government and the pursuit of policies that benefit specific constituencies, the principles set out in Tyranny Unmasked are as relevant today as they were in 1822.”


    Gary M. Galles

    Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. His recent books include Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies (2014) and Apostle of Peace (2013). He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.




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