The Real Constitution and Civil Disobedience


I have no doubt that there is a “real” Constitution. Randy Barnett makes a good case for it:


It is equally indubitable that the United States has become a nation of unconstitutional laws — a vast number and variety of them. For proof, if proof you need, peruse the United States Code, the Code of Federal Regulations (which includes presidential Executive Orders), and the statutes and regulations of the States (accessible through State and Local Government on the Net).

Which brings me to civil disobedience:

the active refusal to obey certain laws, demands and commands of a government, or of an occupying power, without resorting to physical violence.



As a result of the de facto seizure of America’s governments by forces aligned against the Constitution, Americans and the American economy are weighed down with tens of thousands of intrusive, arbitrary, and wasteful laws and regulations. Every aspect of our lives is touched, directly or indirectly, by those laws and regulations.

Some laws and regulations are legitimate, in that they are consistent with liberty:

Whether a particular regulation is consistent with liberty depends on the justification offered on its behalf. Regulations are not inimical to liberty if they coordinate individual conduct as do, for example, traffic regulations mandating driving on one side of the street or the other. They may also be consistent with liberty if they prevent irreparable tortious accidents before they occur, as speed limits do. . . . Although many libertarians object to government ownership of highways, no libertarian objects in principle to a highway owner regulating its use to enhance the speed and safety of driving. Similarly, contract law is a body of rules regulating the making and enforcing of agreements, and libertarians are not opposed to contract law. . . .

A law restricting conduct is consistent with a right to liberty, therefore, if it is prohibiting wrongful acts that violate the rights of others or regulating rightful acts in such a way as to coordinate conduct or prevent the violation of rights that might accidentally occur. A law is inconsistent with liberty if it is either prohibiting rightful acts, or regulating unnecessarily or improperly. A regulation is improper when it imposes an undue burden on rightful conduct, or when its justification is merely a pretext for restricting a liberty of which others disapprove. And one way of identifying a regulation as pretextual is to assess whether the regulatory means it employs do not effectively fit its purported health and safety ends.

Here is how the majority in Lochner distinguished a constitutional exercise of the police power from an unconstitutional restraint on liberty:


We may conclude from all this that . . . the fact that regulations of liberty have been upheld as constitutional is no evidence that the general constitutional right to liberty does not exist. It may merely be a sign that the government has met its properly-defined burden of proof. (Randy Barnett, “Is the Constitution Libertarian?,” pages 8-9)

The difficulty is that



I consider few governmental restrictions on action as legitimate, that is, “properly regulating rightful acts,” as Barnett puts it. It is legitimate to set and enforce a low speed limit in a school zone, to exact stiff penalties for drunken driving, and to ban the use of a cell phone while driving. But it is questionably legitimate to ticket a capable, sober driver for exceeding the speed limit by 10 miles an hour on a flat stretch of well-maintained, dry interstate highway, in light traffic. And it is grossly illegitimate to enter a judicial decision that forbids a wheat farmer to exceed a federal allotment by growing additional wheat for consumption on his own farm. Indeed, the law that allows the federal government to establish such allotments in the first place is supremely illegitimate — as are all laws that do harm rather than good because they penalize and interfere with acts that are either harmless or actually beneficial.


Americans have been lulled by what Tocqueville calls “soft despotism.” As I have said,



How did we get to this point? We got here via the interest-group paradox:




Today, with a century-plus of “progressivism” behind us, more than 40 percent of GDP is controlled directly by government, through taxes and regulations. Those same taxes and regulations, because of their disincentivizing effects, have imposed vastly higher hidden costs on Americans.

And there is more to come, as the demi-gods in Washington seek to repeal the laws of economics by promising more medical care to more persons while discouraging entry into the healing professions and the development of beneficial drugs. On top of that they seek to repeal the laws of physics by further constraining the economy in a fruitless struggle against global warming, which is not a man-made phenomenon.

If you think your liberty (such as it is) has survived (or will survive) those and other economic depredations, think again, for social liberty is indivisible from economic liberty:


A small sample of control, in today’s America, is found in a recent action by the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS prevented government-regulated insurance companies from advising policy holders of the ill effects that Obamacare would have on their insurance coverage. So much for freedom of speech.

More generally, I offer the following thoughts by Walter Lippmann (via Don Boudreaux):

I recalled this wise warning from Walter Lippmann (found on pages 105-106 of Lippmann’s 1937 book The Good Society):



The seizure of America’s governments by the lawless occupying powers of “progressivism” not only has cost Americans dearly but also has made us hostages in our own land:


Under the circumstances, it would be natural — and legitimate — for Americans to resort to massive civil disobedience.

And Americans often do resort to civil disobedience, but mainly in relatively trivial ways (e.g., exceeding speed limits on open highways, under safe conditions). The general reluctance of Americans to commit acts of civil disobedience is unsurprising, given the apparent entanglement of government in our lives and businesses. Unless one chooses a truly self-sufficient life, it is practically impossible to avoid governmental notice of and influence on major events and transactions, for example, births, weddings, employment, the acquisition of life’s essentials (food, clothing, shelter, medical care), and the enjoyment of stimulants, entertainment, and so on.

Accordingly, it is natural for individuals to believe that the heavy hand of government is inescapable. Thus most of us do not try to elude government’s heavy hand, except in relatively trivial ways. And we believe that those who do try to elude it — bootleggers and black marketeers, for example — are often found out and punished. But that impression is due to a kind of reverse survivor bias; that is, we know about the bootleggers and black marketeers who are caught, but we don’t know about the ones who elude official notice.

Imagine an America in which most individuals and businesses routinely commit acts of civil disobedience. Could the various governments in and of the United States possibly detect and punish more than a small fraction of those acts of civil disobedience? The answer, of course, is “no.”

What keeps most individuals and businesses from committing more than trivial acts of civil disobedience is the fear that their particular transgressions will be among the small fraction that is detected and punished. This kind of fear has an especially strong deterrent effect under oppressive regimes that rely on informants and harsh punishments to discourage acts of civil disobedience. The contrast between America and, say, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia ought to give heart to Americans. Informants and punishments there are, and always will be, but in American neither of them is on a scale to match the insidious and barbaric regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and their ilk. Not yet, at least.

And in the preceding sentence there is both hope and urgency. Our daily lives are not yet completely dominated by the state. We still have options in many aspects of our lives — even if those options, themselves, are shaped by laws and regulations. Houses and automobiles, for example, must meet thousands of government specifications, but they still are available with a broad array of features, for a broad range of prices.

But how much longer will our illusory freedom last against the onslaught of statism? That is the urgent question, given the prospects at hand for effective government control of the economy through environmental legislation, a complete government takeover of medicine, the punishment of “thought crimes,” the general expansion of paternalistic policies, and on and on.

I leave the enumeration of legitimate acts of civil disobedience as an exercise for the reader. But the time to consider civil disobedience is now, while there is a spark of liberty in the land.

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.