Lew recently linked to a great Brian Doherty column on the Americans With Disabilities Act. Doherty has a great line: “Studying the language and reasoning of the decisions, concurrences, and dissents in Tennessee v. Lane shines a light on a weird constitutional alchemy whereby citizen’s rights morph into government powers—as long as those powers are exercised in supposed furtherance of those rights.”
This mirrors what some of us have said for some time. I continue to be baffled by libertarians who naively support the Supreme Court granting citizens “rights”. They seem totally oblivious of the fact that in our system, granting someone a “right” means granting the government–usually the federal government–a power. In other words: those asking for greater federal protection of rights by judicial interpretation of the Constitution are, in effect, campaigning for increased federal power, at the expense of the states; i.e., they are advocating greater centralization of power.It also calls to mind Mises’ wise counsel:
“No socialist author ever gave a thought to the possibility that the abstract entity which he wants to vest with unlimited power—whether it is called humanity, society, nation, state, or government—could act in a way of which he himself disapproves.”
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 692 (rev’d ed. 1966).
11:44 pm on May 23, 2004
