The errors that ruined their enterprise may be reduced to one. Having put the nation in the place of the Crown, they invested it with the same unlicensed power, raising no security and no remedy against oppression from below, assuming, or believing, that a government truly representing the people could do no wrong. They acted as if authority, duly constituted, requires no check.

The Ant Works Hard

    Classic Version: The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The shivering grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

    The Modern Politically Correct Version: The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others less fortunate like him are cold and starving. ABC and Channel 9 show up to provide live coverage of the shivering grasshopper, with cuts to a video of the ant in his comfortable warm home with a table filled with food. Americans are stunned that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so while others have plenty. The Democrats, the Greens and the Coalition Against Poverty demonstrate in front of the ant's house. ABC News, interrupting a cultural festival special from the South with breaking news, broadcasts them singing "We Shall Overcome." Jessie Jackson rants in an interview with Dan Rather that the ant has gotten rich off the backs of grasshoppers, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share." In response to polls, Democratic Party leaders draft the Economic Equity and Grasshopper Anti-Discrimination Act, retroactive to the beginning of the summer. And the Party quickly passes it through the Congress with many in opposition afraid not to vote for it. The ant's taxes are reassessed and he is also fined for failing to hire grasshoppers as helpers. Without enough money to pay both the fine and his newly imposed retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government. The ant moves to Asia, and starts a successful agribiz company. The TV stations later show the now fat grasshopper finishing up the last of the ant's food though Spring is still months away. While the government owned house he is in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he hadn't maintained it. Inadequate government funding is blamed. Former Presidents Clinton and Carter now are appointed to head a commission of enquiry that will cost $10,000,000. The grasshopper is soon dead of a drug overdose, the New York Times blames it on obvious failure of government to address the root causes of despair arising from social inequity.

I defy anyone to say how even the thought of revolution, or insurrection, of the slightest uprising could arise against a government whose organized force was confined only to suppressing injustice.

In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual’s right to self defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder - is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?

The state is a divine institution. Without it we have anarchy, and the lawlessness of anarchy is counter to the natural law: so we abjure all political theories which view the state as inherently and necessarily evil. But it is the state which has been in history the principal instrument of abuse of the people, and so it is central to the conservatives' program to keep the state from accumulating any but the most necessary powers.

The very possession of power excites a desire to use it, and it is an admitted characteristic of our human nature that those vested with power, political or other, are prone to exercise it unduly, to abuse it...Hence to ensure justice the governmental organization should be such that the limits of the various powers of the government be carefully defined and its administrators be kept within those limits.

EMERY, LUCILIUS A., Concerning Justice, Chapter V, Best Form of Government

One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one.

EMERY, LUCILIUS A., Concerning Justice, Chapter V, Best Form of Government

If it be said that public opinion is sufficient restraint, the answer is that in a democracy, or in a republic with universal suffrage, the efficient public opinion is practically that of the majority of the electorate.

EMERY, LUCILIUS A., Concerning Justice, Chapter VI, Bill of Rights

We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may also prevent its use for desirable purposes.

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression.

That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.

Men have different views on the empirical end of happiness and what it consists of, so that as far as happiness is concerned, their will cannot be brought under any common principle nor thus under any external law harmonizing with the freedom of everyone.

[I]t may happen, and, indeed, it has happened repeatedly, that although the rules and ruled change, those that are ruled are arbitrary and oppressive whenever their turn arrives; and no political state of things is more efficient in preparing the people to pass over into despotism, by a sudden turn, than this alternation of arbitrary rule.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter II

We might say with greater truth, that where the minority is protected, although the majority rule, there, probably, liberty exists. But in this latter case it is the protection, or in other words, rights beyond the reach of the majority which constitute liberty, not the power of the majority.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter II

[U]nless very strong and distinct guarantees of protection are given...there can be no security against oppression. For government is a power, and, like every power in existence, it is desirous of carrying its point.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter VII

The market democracy is irreconcilable with liberty as we love it. It is absolutism...The people, which means nothing more than an aggregate of men, require fundamental laws of restraint, as much as each component individual does.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter XV

[E]verything intrusted to the hands of man may be abused.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter XVII

[T]he common mistake of those who are not bred in civil liberty, and are unacquainted with the appliance of self-government...believe popular power alone, uniform, sweeping, and inorganic, constitutes liberty, or is all that is necessary to insure it... Power is not liberty. Power is necessary for protection, and liberty consists, in a great measure, in protection of certain rights and certain institutions.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter XXXI

The only way to make a government tolerant, and hence genuinely free, is to keep it weak.

Every step a government takes beyond the fulfillment of its essential functions of protecting the smooth operation of the market economy against aggression...is a step forward on a road that directly leads into the totalitarian system where there is no freedom at all.

If government were in a position to expand its power ad libitum, it could abolish the market economy and substitute for it all-round totalitarian socialism. In order to prevent this, it is necessary to curb the power of government. This is the task of all constitutions, bills of rights, and laws. This is the meaning of all struggles which men have fought for liberty.

In the realm of state and government, liberty means restraint imposed upon the exercise of the police power.

Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of what is called economic freedom.

There is also an impression that if actual recessions [in State power] do not come about of themselves, they may be brought about by the expedient of voting one political party out and another one in. This idea rests upon certain assumptions that experience has shown to be unsound; the first one being that the power of the ballot is what republican political theory makes it out to be, and that therefore the electorate has an effective choice in the matter. It is a matter of open and notorious fact that nothing like this is true...in the nature of things the exercise of personal government, the control of a huge and growing bureaucracy, and the management of an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power, are as agreeable to one stripe of politician as they are to another...it is clear that whatever party-competition we shall see hereafter will be on the same terms as heretofore. It will be a competition for control and management, and it would naturally issue in still closer centralization, still further extension of the bureaucratic principle, and still larger concessions to subsidized voting-power. This course would be strictly historical, and is furthermore to be expected as lying in the nature of things, as it so obviously does.

I became aware of my conditioned gut reaction to a question that once I noticed it, I realized was everywhere, implicitly and explicitly demanding of me: "Why do you need to do that?" Like a good brainwashed cog I felt compelled to explain why someone might need a lower tax rate or "that type of gun" or to keep an abortion from her husband and on and on and on...despite all of my budding individualist, libertarian philosophy, I was still submissive to the collectivist impulses of society...At some point the proper relationship between governed and government stopped being "The government must show need before getting permission to act" and became "The people must show need to curtail government action."

[T]he ideas that our rights are limited by our needs, or worse, that our needs translate into others' debts, are the primary memes out there. And that's not fertile ground for liberty.

[W]hen government powers are minimal, the question of who runs the state becomes relatively trivial.

Power always stands ready to conspire against liberty, and the only salvation is for the public to keep government within strictly limited bounds, and to be ever watchful, vigilant, and hostile to the inevitable tendencies of government power to encroach upon liberty.

We may lose our power to make our own decisions about a growing array of issues –– economic, social, educational –– but, by God, we still have the right to vote for two utterly corrupt and venal sets of professional politicos from time to time. It follows that we are "free."

As the sovereignty of the Union is limited and incomplete, its exercise is not incompatible with liberty; for it does not excite those insatiable desires of fame and power which have proved so fatal to great republics.

TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE, Democracy in America, Chapter VIII

Only the checks put upon magistrates make nations free; and only the want of such checks makes them slaves. They are free, where their magistrates are confined within certain bounds set them by the people...And they are slaves, where the magistrates choose their own rules, and follow their lust and humours; than which a more dreadful curse can befall no people...and therefore most nations in the world are undone, and those nations only who bridle their governors do not wear chains.

It is the nature of Power to be ever encroaching, and converting every extraordinary power, granted at particular times, and upon particular occasions, into an ordinary power, to be used at all times, and when there is no occasion; nor does it ever part willingly with any advantage.

[T]he motives which predominate most in human affairs are self-love and self-interest.

In the last analysis, any government, regardless of what it may be called, must be one man or a small group of men in power over many men...The only way in which men can remain free and be left in control of their individual energies is to cut the power of government to an irreducible minimum.