Stephan, I’ve read the personal attacks on you by the creepy and malevolent little liar, Timothy Sandefur, in response to your suggestion that the Heller gun control decision by the Supreme Court may not be the greatest achievement in the history of liberty since the Magna Carta.

So-called libertarians who dismiss your concerns about the role of federalism in the original Constitution are repudiating the method of analysis that all classical liberal scholars who have advocated limited constitutional government have embraced, beginning with the likes of Jefferson and Madison, up through Hayek and his intellectual descendants. That method is to attempt to establish a governmental process that is most conducive to the protection of life, liberty and property, while recognizing that, government being what it is, there will be many actions of government that do the opposite. Perfection is not of this world. From this perspective the best structure of government is one that minimizes tyranny and maximizes liberty. This is what the Jeffersonians hoped the Constitution, and its system of “divided sovereignty,” sometimes called “federalism” or “states’ rights,” would do.

The “libertarian” celebrants of Heller are taking the opposite, “end-state approach” to the subject by claiming that the current system of judicial dictatorship, whereby everyone’s liberty is defined by a few government lawyers with lifetime tenure, is the best of all worlds — as long as we can influence the majority once in a while, as in the Heller decision. The ends justify the means. To them, the structure of the Constitition doesn’t matter; what matters is individual outcomes of particular cases, which they are naive (stupid?) enough to believe they will be able to influence over the long run. Hayek himself would likely have called such thinking a “fatal conceit,” not much different from the conceit that a few smart men could centrally plan an entire economy.