To return to the minimalist Federal government we had at the time the Constitution was written is absurd. What worked for three million people in the Age of Sail, cannot work for 300 million in the Nuclear Age. The Federal government and all of those subordinate to it as the "supreme Law of the Land," must be more ready than ever to interpose its collective power against those who would violate the rights or threaten the lives of individual Americans--especially giant, multinational corporations.
At the same time, citizens and their Representatives must be continually poised to oppose that government, when it oversteps its proper limits. Acting collectively, citizens and politicians can stop government excesses before they become a problem, although I believe that this will require both the expansion of the House of Representatives. as well as campaign finance reform, to accomplish.
Collectives, even privately held collectives like corporations, are important tools for humanity's survival, and have been for over ten millennia. They concentrate human power--political, economic, and social--and material resources to accomplish those projects that no single human or human family could hope to accomplish on their own.
Government too, is a form of a collective. At its most brutal and despotic, it is where the strongest local brigand has organized a group of family and friends, and promises to protect hardworking farmers, herdsmen, artisans and their families from brigands (including, of course, himself), in exchange for some percentage of the food and goods that they produce. The individuals have little power, and they sooner or later rise against their oppressors.
At their best, governments form out of the recognition of the interdependency and common cause that a group of humans in a given geographic location have with one another. They join together, not only for defense from enemies outside the group, but to settle disputes within the group peacefully. This settlement of disputes may be very simple at first: an agreement to take it before a group of elders, or someone elected by the entire group, whose decision is binding. After a time, records of these decisions are kept, and a corpus of law emerges so that there is some consistency in decisions made from year to year. If the decisions no longer work because of changing conditions, then the group gathers in an assembly and votes to change the law from that day forward.
Of these two types, the second historically is more stable and productive.
Libertarians and conservatives should remind themselves that their idol Ayn Rand had feet of clay. In the 1930's, she hypocritically took money from the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA) to produce plays she had written. In the last years of her life, she took advantage of both Roosevelt's Social Security and Johnson's Medicare under her married name of Mrs. Frank O'Connor, after she was diagnosed with lung cancer.
Robert Nozick did not do much better even during his lifetime, with his seminal book Anarchy, Utopia, and the State (1974), being attacked not only by non-Libertarians, but by Libertarians like Murray N. Rothbard as well. In his article "Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of State," (Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol.1, No. 1; pp. 45-57; Pergamon Press, London, 1977), Professor Rothbard points out that the state described by Nozick relies a lot on an "invisible hand," both to come into existence and to maintain itself. No thought is given to appeals of judicial decisions, taxes or any other means for the government to maintain itself.
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