While I welcome a good verbal spar with an Ayn Rand acolyte, I have no stomach for the heaping helping of historical revisionism that has been appended to the libertarian cause by its leaders. It’s one thing to argue on, ahem, principle that the federal government should not be allowed to control carbon emissions or which races of people get to eat in which restaurants, but it is quite another to assert the frankly ludicrous claim that our country was established by a group of libertarians who intended to bequeath to us a toothless national government. The idea that our Founding Fathers envisioned a regime opposed to regulation and the protection of its citizens’ welfare from private actors, laughable to any serious historian, has nevertheless become the signature bromide of the libertarian vocabulary. The Constitution, it is often remarked, establishes a government of limited powers — an unobjectionable truth — but the fact that its powers are limited does not negate the mountain of evidence that those venerable lions who invented American democracy were far more concerned with corporate usurpations of freedom than by any threat posed by a government fairly elected by the people.
“The power of all corporations ought to be limited,” wrote James Madison, the framer whose influence echoes most resoundingly in the Constitution, as “the growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.” Madison’s preference for a strong national government was borne of a distaste for the debtor relief laws being passed by state legislatures during the post-war economic downturn of the 1780s. Like fellow Federalists James Wilson and Alexander Hamilton, he saw the Constitutional Convention as an opportunity to craft a central government powerful enough to serve as an effective check on the states — an entity that for all intents and purposes hadn’t existed during the ill-fated tenure of the Articles of Confederation. In the Virginia Plan, the Convention’s initial blueprint for what would ultimately become the Constitution, Madison argued that Congress should have the power to veto state laws, that the president should serve for an unlimited number of seven-year terms (nine years for senators), and that the country should be ruled by what Thomas Jefferson called the “natural aristocracy” — that is to say, elites. He left the Convention frustrated that the national government, despite being granted broad commerce powers, was not made to be as powerful as he had hoped.
Jefferson, of course, is the Founding Father most often cited for his supposedly libertarian sentiments, perhaps due to his wariness of the national government with respect to its interference in the rights of states. To draw from Jefferson’s anti-federalism that he was anti-government, however, would be a mistake, as he too was infinitely more guarded against corporate tyranny than the public variety. “I hope we shall… crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations,” he wrote in 1816,* “which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” While Jefferson was not technically a Framer — he was in France for the duration of the Constitutional debates — challenges to the Constitution among those delegates who shared his less-than-enthusiastic views on Federalism likewise centered on, well, anything but modern libertarian concerns. Some thought that states would be better equipped to levy taxes than a central government, some thought that Congress would eliminate elections once in power, some thought that state legislatures should be permitted to recall their senators, and some thought that there needed to be a religious oath requirement for elected officials.
Wednesday 11 January 2012
The Founding Fathers Were Not Libertarians ☀
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