The Bill of Rights v. The General Welfare Clause and the Future of America
November 16, 2009 09:50 AMBy Koil Rowland
The first ten amendments to our federal Constitution are usually called The Bill of Rights. They’re much and properly admired and much and rightfully praised by political theorists and practitioners of all persuasions. The Bill of Rights has been repeatedly examined and commented on by people far better equipped than I am to theorize about its intent and analyze its contents. .Despite that obvious fact, I mean in the paragraphs which follow to offer you a few thoughts of my own about it (most of them stolen shamelessly from my betters) which may not have occurred to you recently. But before I do that, let me clear a little ground.
Government is primarily an instrument for the applying of force. At least that’s what the editors of Webster’s New World Dictionary appear to have thought when they put their book together. The first of their several definitions of government in that estimable tome calls government “the exercise of authority,” and describes it as an agent of “direction; control, rule, management . . .” My hero Frank Meyer taught me long years ago something about government that all of us ought to keep constantly in the front of our minds, but do not: namely, that government has a monopoly on all the legal force there is. It seems obvious to me that this monopoly and government’s use of it are playing increasingly important roles in American life.
Our nation’s Founders knew well about government’s penchant for acquiring, hoarding, and using power. So the first ten amendments they added to The Constitution bristled with prohibitions and cataloged a wide variety of things the government they had created could not do. You know those prohibitions as well as I do. I don’t intend to list them for you here.
The point I wish to make about The Bill of Rights is that it provides a strong foundation for the American belief that government’s most important function is to keep people from doing each other harm. It’s legitimate to call that view of government “passive.” But, however it’s labeled, understanding government as passive in intent and operation is fundamental to America’s understanding of itself – and a cornerstone of American government life. And the foundational nature of understanding government as an essentially passive artifact goes way back, all the way back to the time two centuries ago and more when The Bill of Rights was appended to our Constitution.
But there’s another understanding of American government and its role in American life that’s becoming increasingly prevalent. That’s the understanding of it commonly called “activist,” the one that looks for its ultimate sanction to the general welfare clause in the Preamble to the Constitution. And it goes back a good way too – not close to as far back as the one embodied and codified in The Bill of Rights, but almost a century now and arguably a good bit farther than that.
The view embodied in the general welfare clause is that government’s functions are not only to keep people from doing harm to each other, but also – and far more importantly – to act as an agent for helping people and sometimes coercing them to do good for each other, and also as an agent for doing good for people when they’re unable to do good for themselves.
The view that good government looks for its ultimate sanction to The Constitution’s general welfare clause is pervasive in American life today, and still in the ascendancy. But the view that good government is rooted in the prohibitions enumerated in The Bill of Rights still has its adherents too. There’s no way of reconciling the views of those Bill of Rights adherents, as I’ll call them, with the views of those in the general welfare camp. Either government’s prime function is that of arbiter and enforcer of the law or its prime function is that of dispenser of goods and services to the deserving citizenry. There’s no way of finessing the differences between the basic beliefs of the two camps which have fashioned and are residing in that particular either/or. And because no compromise between them is possible, a legal and ideational war between the two camps is raging, and has raged for many decades now. The outcome of that war is still in doubt. And on its outcome much depends – for our generation and all the American generations to come.
Koil Rowland is a writer in Jefferson City, Missouri.
Our nation’s Founders knew well about government’s penchant for acquiring, hoarding, and using power. So the first ten amendments they added to The Constitution bristled with prohibitions and cataloged a wide variety of things the government they had created could not do.
