Catallaxy Files, Corrected

Catallaxy Files (.com) err in supporting constitutional government. Three explanatory quotes below.

Ludwig von Mises (in 1944) said:

The bureaucrat is not only a government employee. He is, under a democratic constitution, at the same time a voter and as such a part of the sovereign, his employer. He is in a peculiar position: he is both employer and employee. And his pecuniary interest as employee towers above his interest as employer, as he gets much more from the public funds than he contributes to them … This double relationship becomes more important as the people on the government’s payroll increase. The bureaucrat as voter is more eager to get a raise than to keep the budget balanced. His main concern is to swell the payroll … This is one of the antinomies inherent in present-day constitutional issues. It has made many people despair of the future of democracy. As they became convinced that the trend toward more government interference with business, toward more offices with more employees, toward more doles and subsidies is inevitable, they could not help losing confidence in government by the people.

Albert Jay Nock (in 1943) said:

The idea of a self-limiting or temporary collectivism impresses me as too absurd to be seriously discussed … [N]o one call fall out of a forty-storey window and stop at the twentieth storey … [T]here can be no such thing as a ten-per-cent collectivist State for any length of time. One might just as sensibly speak of a ten-per-cent mammalian pregnancy.

Lysander Spooner (in 1870) said:

Inasmuch as the Constitution was never signed, nor agreed to, by anybody, as a contract, and therefore never bound anybody, and is now binding upon nobody; and is, moreover, such an one as no people can ever hereafter be expected to consent to, except as they may be forced to do so at the point of the bayonet, it is perhaps of no importance what its true legal meaning, as a contract, is. Nevertheless, the writer thinks it proper to say that, in his opinion, the Constitution is no such instrument as it has generally been assumed to be; but that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize. He has heretofore written much, and could write much more, to prove that such is the truth. But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

Murray Rothbard (in 1973) said:

The libertarian is realistic because he understands that government tends to expand. The “limited government realist” is the utopian, learning nothing from the failure of the 1789 constitution to restrain government. He who puts all the guns and decision-making power into the hands of government and then says, “Limit yourself”; it is he who is the impractical utopian. [paraphrased]