Freedom Has Ceased To Be A Birthright;

We Have Been Living Amidst One Of The Great Revolutions Of Human History, And We Hardly Know It: The Penetration Of The State Into Every Aspect Of Human Life And Society. Some People Regard This As Good And "progressive," Others Regard It As Tyrannical; But Either Way, It's A Fact, A Transformation As Great As, Say, The Industrial Revolution. Absolutely Nothing Is Now Beyond The Scope Of State Power.

It's A Real Enigma Why People Are So Averse To Real Free Market Capitalism Even Now. Here We Are, In The Century That Has Seen Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot-and We're Still Being Warned Against The 'robber Barons' Of The 19th Century. I Don't Know That Jay Gould Or John D. Rockefeller Ever Killed Anyone. The State Has Killed Countless People, And Yet We're Always Supposed To Remain On Guard Against These 'greedy Villains' Of Yesteryear.

The Second Amendment, Like The Rest Of The Bill Of Rights, Was Meant To Inhibit Only The Federal Government, Not The States. The Framers, As The Federalist Papers Attest (see No. 28), Saw The State Militias As Forces That Might Be Summoned Into Action Against The Federal Government Itself, If It Became Tyrannical.

I Call The Present System 'post-constitutional America.' As I Sometimes Put It, The U.s. Constitution Poses No Serious Threat To Our Form Of Government.

Liberals See The Constitution Itself As 'living' And 'evolving' That Is, Gradually Turning Into Something That Would Have Been Unrecognizable To Its Authors.