link to original reddit post by /u/Anenome5
The color yellow or gold has been long associated with liberty and libertarianism, thus to take the yellow-pill would mean to dig into the libertarian view of a thing. Let us dig into the libertarian position on something that should be important to any libertarian: the failure that is known as the Constitution.
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(Below are two sets of resources, a selection of articles from Mises.org allowing you to drill down into what's been written about the constitution from multiple libertarian sources, including Rothbard.
After that is a video and audiobook section for those of you unable to read but whom can listen to a lecture or audiobook.)
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What is the Constitution, as Judged by Libertarians?
In short, the constitution is an excuse to enslave us, it is the means by which an entire people group and their descendants were enslaved under a state, that is under an organized gang of criminal violence, by a group of wealthy statists back in the 1700's who used the powers of that state to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us, see Hamilton's bond buying scandal, and force taxes on the very people that had fought to end taxes from Britain, see the Whiskey Rebellion.
If you're a former republican who has not yet been yellow-pilled on the constitution, this post is aimed squarely at you. The fact is, you have been lied to and if you actually read the truth about the founding and creation of the constitution, it is going to shock you. Nor can you become a hardcore libertarian without realizing that the constitution is a roadblock to true liberty in every way.
The constitution has a great deal of unearned prestige, with many people thinking far more highly of it than it deserves. But it is a document of tyranny, expressly designed by its creators to create an all-powerful central government, and that is exactly what it has built. The statists of that day schemed together to have it passed against the opposition of people like Thomas Jefferson and many of the others who signed the Declaration of Independence. Only 5 names are signed to both documents.
The constitution has become praised as virtually being on the level of holy writ, that vulgar hagiography serving to insulate it from critical thinking by basically anyone.
I can sum up the constitution's major flaw in this way: It charges those in power with the responsibility to enforce and observer the limits of their own power.
Given such a ridiculous structure, we should only ever expect those limits to be forever expanded until the government is inevitably converted into one of absolute power.
That correctly described what has been happening to the US political system since the constitution was adopted and nothing has changed this progress towards authoritarian power since then, and nothing ever will, not how anyone votes and not who you put into power, because it is the STRUCTURE itself that is bad and flawed, and must ITSELF be replaced with something different.
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A Selection of Articles and Snippets
Rothbard: The Constitution Was a Coup d'État
It is well known that Rothbard took the American Revolution to be mainly libertarian in its inspiration. The libertarian impulses of the Revolution were betrayed by a centralizing coup d’état. As Rothbard puts it:
"Basically, urban merchants and artisans, as well as many slaveholding planters, united in support of a strong nation-state that would use the power of coercion to grant them privileges and subsidies. The subsidies would come at the expense of the average subsistence yeoman farmer who might be expected to oppose such a new nationalism. But against them, to support a new constitution, were the commercial farmers aided by the southern plantation-farmers who also wanted power and regulation for their own benefit. Given the urban support, the split among the farmers, and the support from wealthy educated elites, it is not surprising that the nationalist forces were able to execute their truly amazing political coup d’état which illegally liquidated the Articles of Confederation and replaced it with the Constitution. In short, they were able to destroy the original individualist and decentralized program of the American Revolution. (p. 128)"
The theme I should like to concentrate on is this: what happens to the way we understand the Constitution if Rothbard is right that it was a centralizing document? The Anti-Federalists, with whom Rothbard agreed, denounced it for that reason...
The Prophetic Antifederalists
Most school kids are left with the impression that the US Constitution was the inevitable followup to the Declaration of Independence and the war with King George. What they miss out on is the exciting debate that took place after the war and before the Constitution, a debate that concerned the dangers of creating a federal government at all.
Everyone knows about the Federalists who pushed the Constitution. But far less known are the Antifederalists who warned with good reason against the creation of a new centralized government, and just after so much blood had been spilled getting rid of one.
The first of the Antifederalist Papers appeared in 1789. The Antifederalists were opponents of ratifying the US Constitution as it would create what would become an overbearing central government.
The Constitution Failed
Contrary to a certain nostalgic nationalist myth that still endures, the US Constitution as first conceived was never intended to limit government power. The primary purpose of the Convention of 1787 was to increase federal power, as the older constitution of 1776 (i.e., the Articles of Confederation) was regarded by centralizers as being too "weak."...
The Constitution Does What it Was Written To Do — Expand Government Power
A great many people — especially conservatives — reverence the Constitution, consider that it has been abused and that if only the doctrines expressed within were revived and respected, all would be well with America again.
This, of course, is a kind of children’s bedtime story — and approximates reality to about the same degree as the story of the Three Little Pigs.
The Constitution was peddled and imposed on us by men like Alexander Hamilton, a grasper after power who very openly loathed the ideas expressed by men like Jefferson in his Declaration (and even more so in his Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions).
Hamilton and his faction — they were called Federalists, which meant then what it means today — intended to create a centralized government on the British model, but without a hereditary monarch. The Bill of Rights was just barely added, in order to sooth the (rightly, as it turned out ) suspicious, such as George Mason of Virginia.
Patrick Henry smelled a rat...
The Myth of the Constitution
In case any reader still clings to the platitude that the American political system is based on the proposition that ours is “a society of laws, and not of men,” I urge you to pay close attention to the events of recent years. Political behavior does not exist in abstractions, such as the “state,” or the “government,” or a “constitution,” but is activity engaged in by such men and women who find the machinery of state power a useful device for accomplishing ends that they value. Those who desire to control others through access to the tools of violence that define the state, have rationales to convince their intended victims of the “rightness” of their rule. From explanations such as “God’s will” to the “divine right of kings,” the authority of some to enjoy coercive power over others — along with their subjects’ duty of obedience — is so engrained into the minds of people as to seem as self-evident as the forces of gravity...
Liberty vs. the Constitution: The Early Struggle
The Constitution looked fairly good on paper, but it was not a popular document; people were suspicious of it, and suspicious of the enabling legislation that was being erected upon it. There was some ground for this. The Constitution had been laid down under unacceptable auspices; its history had been that of a coup d'état.
It had been drafted, in the first place, by men representing special economic interests. Four-fifths of them were public creditors, one-third were land speculators, and one-fifth represented interests in shipping, manufacturing, and merchandising. Most of them were lawyers. Not one of them represented the interest of production — Vilescit origine tali.
In the second place, the old Articles of Confederation, to which the states had subscribed in good faith as a working agreement, made all due provision for their own amendment; and now these men had ignored these provisions, simply putting the Articles of Confederation in the wastebasket and bringing forth an entirely new document of their own devising.
Again, when the Constitution was promulgated, similar economic interests in the several states had laid hold of it and pushed it through to ratification in the state conventions as a minority measure, often — indeed, in the majority of cases — by methods that had obvious intent to defeat the popular will. Moreover, and most disturbing fact of all, the administration of government under the Constitution remained wholly in the hands of the men who had devised the document, or who had been leaders in the movement for ratification in the several states.
Rethinking the Constitution, Completely
The principal thesis of the book is that the Jeffersonian, states' rights understanding of America's founding and the Constitution is correct. When the American colonies assembled in the Continental Congress and adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they did not create a new nation, Abraham Lincoln to the contrary notwithstanding.
The very word "Congress" shows this. "The Congress was, as Massachusetts John Adams put it, a meeting place of ambassadors. In fact, the word congress had always denoted assemblies of the representatives of sovereigns — as in the case of the Congress of Westphalia in the seventeenth century" (p. 10). The Declaration said that the colonies were now states, i.e., independent governments. "In the Declaration's culminating fourth section, Congress declared the colonies to be 'free and independent states' and claimed for them the right to do everything that free countries could do" (p. 11).
Nor did the Articles of Confederation change matters. Each state retained full sovereignty over all matters not "expressly delegated" to the United Sates...
Constitutional Chaos in America with Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
...The 100 mile exception zone is profoundly unconstitutional because it’s judge-created. It’s not in the Fourth Amendment. Most of this began during the drug wars initiated in the Nixon years, when federal judges decided it was better for society to curtail liberties and get drugs off the street than to be faithful to their oaths to uphold the Constitution. There are so many exceptions to the Fourth Amendment in criminal prosecutions that it hardly exists at all. Add the Patriot Act — the so-called Patriot Act — and the USA Freedom Act, which both permit profound violations of the Fourth Amendment on the theory that evidence obtained will be used for intelligence purposes and not for criminal prosecution. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. The same statutes that permit violations — such as listening to every phone call and capturing every keystroke — not only permit but require information obtained by intelligence agencies to be shared with law enforcement. Any judge who accepts this has violated the oath to uphold the Constitution...
No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
Murray N. Rothbard considered 'No Treason' (1867–1870) by Lysander Spooner "the greatest case for anarchist political philosophy ever written."
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