If I line up (at times) with Lew Rockwell, who thinks the Constitution was statist from the beginning, I have to explain myself. If I throw my support behind (say) a Romney the way Hugh Hewitt has in the past, the associational argument evaporates.

But wait a minute. Patrick Henry thought the Constitution as first presented was a statist document. Is he the only one who gets to smell a rat? The first generation of our founders thought the objection potent enough to attach the Bill of Rights to the document, and what is the Bill of Rights? The Bill of Rights is the testimony of our founders that the Constitution as it was first presented created an opening for the erosion of all our rights. I think the Bill of Rights was an adequate firewall in principle (albeit not in practice), but what exactly about subsequent events has demonstrated that such concerns were misplaced? Without the Bill of Rights, we would have turned into the soft despotism we have now a generation or two earlier than we did.

I grant that in America we still have more freedoms than most places in the world, and I really am grateful for that. But our dwindling freedoms will not be maintained if we persist on kidding ourselves about how many of them we have already lost. What is the current price for a modern American to fly across the country? Right. Hundreds of dollars for the ticket, and one crotch check administered by a surly bureaucrat in uniform.

via Bright Lights and Big Bugs.