by Matt Barr

I'm not a libertarian

Ok, I probably am. Reading various fiskings of a piece by a Robert Locke in The American Conservative (e.g.: Samizdata, Reason Online, Prof. Bainbridge [sort of]) though I find myself coming back to the conclusion that I'm something called a Constitutionalist. It's an unfortunate name, in that it sounds like I walk for exercise a lot, and I don't. But if communists and the like-minded can get away with saying that communism has never actually been tried, so we don't know if it works or not, I feel I'm on pretty firm ground if I say that following the constitution of the United States as written has never actually been tried, either, and it's just crazy enough to work.

Because to me, libertarianism is a commitment to a structure of decisionmaking -- a process, I would call it, if that weren't a loaded word in constitutional jurisprudence -- that guarantees to the best extent possible that Americans can govern themselves. Any exception to this ought to be tailored to ensure that laws can't be passed excluding people from the democratic process -- and happily, that's just what the Bill of Rights does, save maybe the Third Amendment.

You can call it "limited government" if you want, because the constitution's prospective government sure is limited, compared to what we have now. I've made a decision though to ground what I think is right and ought to be the structure we live by in this document most all of us purport to really like, even if some of us are reading the super secret code buried in its text. This way, I'm spared the work of coming up with a good way to run things that no one will care about anyway, and can always find written, ratified, venerated support for my positions. Lucky me.

Constitutionalist. Really.

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