Can You Count to Ten?

by Peter Saint-Andre

2006-10-31

I started to read Randy Barnett's book Restoring the Lost Constitution but I didn't need to finish it, because the basic idea is so clear to me: America has reached almost the exact inversion of its founding principles, which (as I've noted before) can be summed up in the last two articles of the Bill of Rights:

IX. The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Unfortunately, our intellectuals and our political elites have never been able to count to ten when it comes to the Bill of Rights. If they could, perhaps we'd still retain a form of government that is strictly limited in its powers -- and a people who are unlimited in the enjoyment of their natural rights. Instead, today we've experienced what folks in software development call scope creep and bloatware. It's about time to hack the political system by performing some serious debugging, no?


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