Yet America still has more civil liberties than European states.
You guys need to understand arguments as people present them, not as you read them offered to you in one of Rothbard's essays. I'm not saying that the Constitution is the panacea. I'm merely making the obvious point that writing down laws that explicitly limit the authority of a state provides an avenue for people to check the growth of the state.
It isn't perfect, sure, and in some ways it might actually expand the powers of the state, but if you are a strict constitutionalist in America in 2024, then you're a libertarian. That obviously isn't true in reverse.
Let me put it this way, if you're going to try and understand the Constitution, you're obligated to learn the theories of the framers, who, with few exceptions, believed in appropriate limits on state power. It informs their thinking in everything related to the government. The debates of the founders on the role of government exist in the larger context of the broad debate on the role of government headed by Locke and the other enlightenment thinkers. This was undeniably a debate on what are the government's proper *limitations*.
You can be salty that they weren't anarchists or that there plans on limiting the state don't work as well as hoped, but you can't just ignore the bill of rights and the Constitution as inherently a part of the effort to delineate the proper bounds of government, nor can you deny that compared to societies with similar cultures (like Europe), it has resisted the *same kind* of growth (multiple times) into the circus we see on TV every day.
The Constitution and Bill of Rights is part of America's small-government culture whether you like it or not. No one who supports reducing the size and scope of the state in America should think that treating it as a poison is going to be at all practically effective in long term reductions in the size of the government.
YTMND
npub13g…lqr87
2024-09-03 11:18:37
in reply to nevent1q…5cah
Author Public Key
npub13gz99m2v8ryhnsrvs7qf0e04d56x4rzmxdulvtvy5424n0uqh02q6lqr87Published at
2024-09-03 11:18:37Event JSON
{
"id": "c88b334b354e3b9653bd0ec84034cb6effb86ed50143d89abb61659c6186142f",
"pubkey": "8a0452ed4c38c979c06c878097e5f56d346a8c5b3379f62d84a55559bf80bbd4",
"created_at": 1725362317,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"e",
"a30811b5701696aae01c50e04c938b11abee65d38c770e29fd6b692b542b2e94",
"",
"root"
],
[
"e",
"9027a2ff475c05935c5f1ceefb0da574e69ca495cf429393adc331040ab7952a"
],
[
"e",
"b1b112dafb4a5621f340ba763b4934434cd072276fd53ab99095c5d97ee9a85e",
"",
"reply"
],
[
"p",
"8a0452ed4c38c979c06c878097e5f56d346a8c5b3379f62d84a55559bf80bbd4"
],
[
"p",
"d307643547703537dfdef811c3dea96f1f9e84c8249e200353425924a9908cf8"
],
[
"p",
"db8f291dcf949373f5224070cbef4fab80b9a8d3434246aca1fe34114cc51dd0"
]
],
"content": "Yet America still has more civil liberties than European states.\n\nYou guys need to understand arguments as people present them, not as you read them offered to you in one of Rothbard's essays. I'm not saying that the Constitution is the panacea. I'm merely making the obvious point that writing down laws that explicitly limit the authority of a state provides an avenue for people to check the growth of the state.\n\nIt isn't perfect, sure, and in some ways it might actually expand the powers of the state, but if you are a strict constitutionalist in America in 2024, then you're a libertarian. That obviously isn't true in reverse.\n\nLet me put it this way, if you're going to try and understand the Constitution, you're obligated to learn the theories of the framers, who, with few exceptions, believed in appropriate limits on state power. It informs their thinking in everything related to the government. The debates of the founders on the role of government exist in the larger context of the broad debate on the role of government headed by Locke and the other enlightenment thinkers. This was undeniably a debate on what are the government's proper *limitations*.\n\nYou can be salty that they weren't anarchists or that there plans on limiting the state don't work as well as hoped, but you can't just ignore the bill of rights and the Constitution as inherently a part of the effort to delineate the proper bounds of government, nor can you deny that compared to societies with similar cultures (like Europe), it has resisted the *same kind* of growth (multiple times) into the circus we see on TV every day.\n\nThe Constitution and Bill of Rights is part of America's small-government culture whether you like it or not. No one who supports reducing the size and scope of the state in America should think that treating it as a poison is going to be at all practically effective in long term reductions in the size of the government.",
"sig": "4210d4b68b18ec09a509c00d95ae289ad3b13a5d7858ee9494c25aff9b3ed2806b8f276799c553ba70abece3d344ce16a6bb116540672594cb32af5f85b78d65"
}