An Analogy Illustrating the Inadequacy of the Constitution
As anarchists of some stripe, we must endure a barrage of silly rhetoric about the Constitution. It’s a never-ending deluge of “If only we got back to the Constitution…” or “If only the Supreme Court observed the Constitutionality of laws…” We must endure an ever increasing supply of Constitutionalists wishing that if only the citizens, or this group of officials, politicians, or school teachers, etc recognized the divine inspiration that is the Constitution, everything would be better.
Others, such as Lysander Spooner, argued, “the Constitution 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.”
I am going to give an analogy based on the latter part — the “powerless to prevent it” part. However, I argue that it not only has been powerless to prevent our ever growing, ever expanding, ever stealing government; it has incentivized its expansion. What other conclusion could we possibly conceive if we live by a document that allows a small group of individuals the legal right to extort the entire population?
However, the blame never rests with the Constitution itself. The blame is always placed on “the people” for not adhering to the Constitution’s rules. Why blame “the people” for a document that clearly sets up an inevitable conclusion?
Here is an analogy: A high school teacher at a private school has a rather curious policy. This teacher’s policy states that every time they give a test, they tell the students not to cheat, and then they leave the building to go read in their car. At the end of the test, they return back to the classroom to grade the papers. For some reason, the students always do extremely well….
Certainly we all agree that the school would place blame for the rampant cheating on the teacher, not the students. It does not matter that the teacher, upon the leaving the classroom, tells the students not to cheat. She placed matters in an obvious and inevitable path to systematic cheating. And since it is a private school in question, I argue that the teacher would immediately be fired upon the administration finding out about the teacher’s test policy.
Like the teacher who leaves the room during a test, the Constitution has not only allowed the kind of government we have, but incentivized this government’s expansion and thieving. Like the teacher who simply tells the students not to cheat, the Constitution’s “limited” and divided powers are inadequate to prevent massive, systematic invasion of person and property.
I say we place blame where it belongs – squarely on the Constitutions impotent shoulders.
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