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Joel_Walbert | 2 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 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
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YTMND | 2 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 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.