In the beginning of his history of the Persian War, Herodotus recounts that in Persia it was considered illegal even to think about something that was illegal to do—in other words, the law sought to control people’s thoughts. Herodotus makes plain that the Persians were not able to do this. We today are able to get closer through the use of modern technology. In Orwell’s 1984, there are telescreens everywhere, as well as hidden cameras and microphones. Nearly everything you do is watched and heard. It even emerges that the watchers have become expert at reading people’s faces. The organization that oversees all this is called the Thought Police.
Government must be limited. It may only exercise the powers we delegate to it. Our rights are ours by nature, and we delegate authority to the government only on condition that our rights be protected, and only in certain ways. The Constitution, which follows the Declaration by eleven years but in principle follows it in every way, lays out a government in which local things are managed locally, by the people nearest and most affected.
What do our schoolchildren not learn? They don’t learn what Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” he wrote in that book regarding the contest between the master and the slave. “The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.” If schoolchildren learned that, they would see that Jefferson was a complicated man, like most of us. They don’t learn that when our nation first expanded, it was into the Northwest Territory, and that slavery was forbidden in that territory. They don’t learn that the land in that territory was ceded to the federal government from Virginia, or that it was on the motion of Thomas Jefferson that the condition of the gift was that slavery in that land be eternally forbidden. If schoolchildren learned that, they would come to see Jefferson as a human being who inherited things and did things himself that were terrible, but who regretted those things and fought against them. And they would learn, by the way, that on the scale of human achievement, Jefferson ranks very high.
Our Constitution gave us a government sufficiently powerful to secure the rights of its citizens, but strictly limited so it would not infringe on those rights.
The astounding thing, after all, is not that some of our Founders were slaveholders. There was a lot of slavery back then, as there had been for all of recorded time. The astounding thing—the miracle, even, one might say—is that these slaveholders founded a republic based on principles designed to abnegate slavery.
The administrative state is a different kind of thing from constitutional and representative government. It is a vastness, an idea whose time ought never to have come.
Certainly, we should have national and state parks and open expanses. But to enjoy them, we must make a living. We must farm, mine, travel, and work as we please. We must act on our own initiative and by our own efforts. We need resources to live on and use, readily available to anyone who wants to work. That is the spirit of a free people.
To remain free, we must have a government accountable to us. That is the first precept of constitutionalism. That is what must be restored.
In 1930, more than 60 percent of the money in government was raised and spent in counties, cities, and towns. The public money was held near the people who contributed it. The federal government controlled less than 20 percent. Now those numbers are reversed. Through a long and steady process, we have moved money out of the pockets of the people and into a treasury far, far away. We have converted America from a bottom-up to a top- down country. Rules proliferate. Expense piles up. Anything dependent upon the government moves like molasses on a winter day, except when the interest of the government is at stake.
During the George W. Bush administration, I told a senior presidential advisor that the No Child Left Behind Act would not do much good. Yes, our K-12 schools are struggling to teach children to read. Adding more regulations and bureaucrats and enabling them to write high stakes testing to drive curricula is only more of the same. He asked, "How can parents know if their children are learning if we don't test?" I replied, "They live with the children, and it is not hard to tell if a child can read. Also, they love them and raise them. That is the system of real accountability." To fix what is wrong in K-12 education, make it less top-heavy. Decentralize authority to local districts and schools, put parents first, and address the problem that more than half the employees in public education are administrators, not teachers.
In the beginning of his history of the Persian War, Herodotus recounts that in Persia it was considered illegal even to think about something that was illegal to do—in other words, the law sought to control people’s thoughts. Herodotus makes plain that the Persians were not able to do this. We today are able to get closer through the use of modern technology. In Orwell’s 1984, there are telescreens everywhere, as well as hidden cameras and microphones. Nearly everything you do is watched and heard. It even emerges that the watchers have become expert at reading people’s faces. The organization that oversees all this is called the Thought Police. 