Tom, re your comment: "This fantasy about a benevolent Leviathan state has an “intellectual” underpinning, of sorts, in Straussianism."  Yes, it is indeed shocking how even many libertarians think we can trust the federal government to protect our rights. As I noted in this post, it is futile to expect a paper Constitution, construed by the state, to serve as a significant and effective limit of that state. Indeed, as Hoppe has argued, the Constitution served as a means of expansion of state power. This is not surprising, given the nature of the state. As Hoppe observes (in Reflections on State and War):

The state is defined as an agency with two unique characteristics. First, it is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction). That is, it is the ultimate arbiter in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving itself. Second, the state is a territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, it is an agency that unilaterally fixes the price citizens must pay for its provision of law and order. ... Predictably, if one can only appeal to the state for justice, justice will be perverted in favor of the state.

Thus, because

the government is the ultimate judge in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving itself ... instead of merely preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision-making will also provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage. That is, if one can only appeal to government for justice, justice will be perverted in the favor of government, constitutions, and supreme courts notwithstanding. Indeed, these are government constitutions and courts, and whatever limitations on government action they may find is invariably decided by agents of the very same institution under consideration. Predictably, the definition of property and protection will be altered continually, and the range of jurisdiction expanded to the government's advantage. The idea of eternal and immutable law that must be discovered will disappear and be replaced by the idea of law as legislation—as flexible state-made law.

Hoppe, The Idea of a Private Law Society. (See also Hoppe, On the Impossibility of Limited Government and the Prospects for a Second American Revolution; and Anthony de Jasay, Against Politics, pp. 5, 19, 22, and ch. 2 et pass., discussing the impossibility of limited government when the state itself construes its own authority, as discussed in my review of same on pp. 86–87.)

Similarly, as J.H. Huebert writes in Book Review of Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty by Randy E. Barnett:

Mr. Barnett's well-reasoned and well-supported arguments for a limited federal government make up a large portion of the book, but I make short shrift of them here because, despite their appeal, they are almost entirely useless. The Ninth Amendment and the Commerce Clause are not, as he says, "lost"—they have been in the Constitution all along. Courts have distorted these provisions not because judges have not had Randy Barnett to explain their true meaning. Courts have done so because they are part of the very federal government Randy Barnett seeks to limit. In general, judges and those who appoint them have no reason to want to limit government. ... Have not judges been responsible for some of the most outrageous expansions of government power? And, after all, are judges not a product of the same political system that gives us legislators and presidents? What president would appoint judges who would tell him he cannot do anything he wants? What Senators would confirm a judicial candidate who tells them that everything they have ever done in office is unconstitutional? The whole enterprise of libertarian constitutional theory ignores all we have learned from public choice economics about the incentives of government actors.

(See also Barnett's response, Libertarianism and Legitimacy: A Reply to Huebert, and Huebert's rejoinder, No Duty to Obey the State: Reply to Barnett. For more skepticism of centralizing state power in the vain hope of protecting individual rights, see The Libertarian Case Against the Fourteenth Amendment; Barnett and the Fourteenth Amendment; Randy Barnett's Proposed "Federalism Amendment"; The Unique American Federal Government; Libertarian Centralists; To Hell with Heller; also More on Kelo and Federalism, and Doherty on Kelo.)