Back to the basics: it is essential for human liberty that government's reach be circumscribed to the maximum extent possible

You must read this entire essay in The Federalist.  It's the kind of piece that's indisputably thematically cohesively, but explores a number of points in the process of establishing its overall point that could be expanded into full-lenght treatment themselves.

It starts with the charge we have all heard from FHers that our (conservative) world view would result in a kind of Dodge City anarchy.  (I've even had one lefty with whom I occasionally tangle on Facebook say the end result of our vision is warlord-dominated Somalia.)  They trace the roots of what this blog calls Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome back to Herbert Hoover, who, even before he was president, a good hundred years ago, when our culture was beginning to succumb to the influence of progressives such as Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Brandeis and Holmes, granted those figures ground and basically apologized for the conservative exaltation of individual sovereignty.  (I learned a great deal about Hoover's RGS from Amity Shlaes's great tome The Forgotten Man.)  The Federalist piece quotes Hoover: "In our individualism we have long since abandoned the laissez faire of the 18th Century – the notion that it is “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.” We abandoned that when we adopted the ideal of equal opportunity . . . We have indeed gone even further in the 20th Century with the embracement of the necessity of a greater and broader sense of service and responsibility to others as a part of individualism."  The authors then outline the predicament Hoover put us in:

Republicans and many of their conservative allies have been fighting an uphill political battle ever since. Having misunderstood, maligned, and willingly ceded the higher ground of the Founders’ project of constitutional liberalism, they have been left arguing for Hoover’s progressive individualism on the utilitarian basis that it is better for the average American than the more explicit statism peddled by the American Left.

And, relatively speaking, it probably is. But having granted that it is the federal government’s job to provide a comprehensive social safety net, moderate income inequality, and guarantee “real” equality of opportunity, Republicans have little room to complain when they are characterized as cold-hearted for wanting to do these things for a few dollars less than the Democrats. After all, as President Obama reminds us regularly, there’s always “more work to be done.”

The authors take a square look at how the Progressive vision plays itself out in our time, quoting from a chilling prescription from modern FHer Thomas Edsall that includes a demand for full employment, "the replacement of means-tested programs [with] universal benefits," and that favorite  ruse of the modern Freedom-Hater, "protecting the environment."  Then they spell out the tepid wonkery with which conservatives tend to fight back:

Here Republicans are tempted to reach for their own economists’ studies and actuarial tables. A high minimum wage stunts job growth; high income tax rates discourage enterprise; trade restrictions increase consumer costs and keep workers in failing industries; we’ve already put more on our social welfare spending credit card than future generations can pay.

True, true, true, and true. But if the argument stops there, the Progressives have already won: all we’re debating is the practicability of their chosen means to their millennialist ends. The good news is that today a new fusionism forming within libertarian, conservative, and populist circles offers a deeper critique–a reexamination of both means and ends and a reaffirmation of the virtue of treating equals equally, grounded in the founders’ moral and political realism.

They then take a look at the national debate of the 1780s.  The Articles of Confederation clearly weren't making it.  But it was Alexander Hamilton who pointed out to the others involved in the debate that a Constitution should not expand a central government's power, but merely fully grant the power that the Articles had conferred:

Hamilton believed, like the others, that history and experience suggested a limited role for the federal government that amounted to four easily-defined, essential tasks: “the common defense of the members; the preservation of the public peace as well against internal convulsions as external attacks; the regulation of commerce with other nations and between the States; the superintendence of our intercourse, political and commercial, with foreign countries.” Almost all of this was already the responsibility of the national government under the Articles. But that charter had not provided the power necessary to accomplish these important ends.

The Constitution, in other words, would succeed where the Articles had failed not by expanding the role of the federal government, but by granting it the authority to fulfill its responsibilities. Nothing could be more “absurd,” Hamilton argued, than expecting the government to make bricks without straw.

True enough, but, if misinterpreted by a public being fed distortion by FHers, the beginnings of a slippery slope:

Today’s Progressives, however, are not content with bricks; in the spirit of medieval alchemists they dream of turning baser human metals into silver and gold. While their success is equally improbable, the consequences of their attempt are much more serious. They’ve gone a long way into transforming a city of free men into a city of pigs.

What would it take to solve the problem of income inequality? What would it take to actualize Obamacare’s promise of cheaper, better healthcare for all? Power: more and more and ever more raw, arbitrary power. And when, despite all their efforts, we’re still no more than a lump of lead? More power still.

It comes down to a question of the proper locus of power.  Does it lie within the sovereign individual, or an overarching structure that is only properly designed to ensure public order?

We see the results all over America today of a people willing to shift that locaus or power away from themselves.  You see it on the sidewalks of Detroit, where hollowed-out former men sit in front of abandoned storefronts sipping Thundrbird from brown paper bags.  You see it in the panicked conversation at kitchen tables on which lie cancellation notices from insurance companies.  You see it in the utterly passive countenance of the eunuch Pajama Boy, a being utterly incapable of thinking about the question of what's important in life.

As I say, the entire essay is your required for today.  Its overall point is the essential question that any and every post here at LITD, no matter the specific topic, deals with:  does human power properly rest with you, or with a state that can ultimately only use it to strip you of your humanity?