Laws are meaningful checks on the authority of particular individuals and institutions even if they aren't 100% effective. The Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, have done more to check the growth of America into resembling modern day Europe than any kind of independent political activism since ratification.
Compared to the Articles, sure, it was a growth in state power. Compared to the rest of the world or the ambitions of modern statists, it has been useful. No matter what, ensuring an environment of freedom requires more than one tool. No one ever claimed otherwise.
Let me put it this way, if you get rid of the constitution now, you're not getting the articles, you're getting the modern UK, France, Germany, Canada, etc.
You already have that with the constitution. You just can't see it as easily.
We don't, actually.
If you go on YouTube and say that the Ukraine War is the intentional policy of the American CIA and State Dept and was caused by the US and NATO, I'm betting you get shut down as fast as talking about the Nazis in Germany.
Fine, but you're not going to prison.
What's the difference? If you can't speak freely without being canceled, you're still a slave to the state.
Besides, there's other ways to get you besides arrest like an FBI raid on your home, an IRS audit, asset seizure, a phone call to your employer that gets you fired, or a lawfare strategy that bankrupts you. Our govt uses all of these methods to shut us down.
And when that doesn't work, they use their agents to set people up for crimes they didn't plan to commit.
The difference is one is people dissociating with you because they don't like you, the other is people locking you in a cage and killing you if you try to leave. Also, people cancelling you has literally zero to do with the constitution, so bringing it up in this context is a non sequitur.
The government using their enforcement arms to make your life miserable is actually illegal, which means there is an avenue of recourse available to you that other states don't offer because they don't have things like the first, fourth, and eighth amendments.
If you're going to come at this from the perspective "The state is bad and there is nothing left to talk about." Fine. You can have that position, but if you're going to try and say that, in the context of existing states, the Constitution doesn't make America qualitatively different than European states, then you're just wrong. It's a libertarian contrarian position that avoids answering hard questions about the structures of states while pretending to be above it all.
I didn't say the constitution in some sense doesn't make us difference, I'm saying it has no power to stop people from ignoring it and doing illegal things. And there really isn't a way to hold those people accountable for ignoring it when they do. Congress doesn't do anything. SCOTUS can only rule and not enforce. POTUS is where most of the offenses are happening. There are still people rotting in jail for Jan 6 who haven't been charged with crimes.
The Constitution is meaningless if our beloved and sacred institutions refuse to recognize it and the people who care about it are too weak to confront them.
Are you mad that laws aren't self-enforcing?
No. I'm mad that no one cares enough about the Constitution to stop the bureaucratic state from harassing US citizens. Congressional committees are there now to protect the BS instead of representing us.
I mean, one of the primary components of a former and possibly repeat president's message to voters has been the danger of the deep state. Something like half of the country is at least not opposed to this idea to such a degree that they'd vote against him for saying it and many support him because he does say it.
Idk, maybe I'm not totally blackpilled, but the fact that we have the kind of opposition to this in America that frankly just doesn't exist in Europe, is primarily due to our robust free speech protections. And we have an economic system that offers a single person with a particular value set to straight up buy one of the most popular social media platforms just to prevent it from censoring people's speech.
Granted, he isn't perfect about it, but it did happen. It happened in America.
I guess I don't see enough of what's happening in Europe or assume it's all done at the orders of the American deep state in their effort to achieve comprehensive influence.
the bill of rights is dead. Completely. every gun law, unconstitutional. Traffic stops and car searches. Unconstitutional. Spying, unconstitutional. we have no privacy, free speech is under attack by the government. Religion under attack by government. How much did the constitution help in 2020 thru 2023? Not one bit. What about Patriot Act and NDAA? Warrantless searches. No knock raids. Yea, Bill of Rights is really helping
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.
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