Find yourself a copy of the United States Constitution. Perhaps you have a copy handy on your bookshelf, otherwise you can just look it up online. A lot of Libertarians will hold up the Constitution as a great and sacred document, a kind of a political Garden of Eden that we have fallen from. Michael Badnarik, 2004 Libertarian Presidential nominee, styles himself a constitutional scholar for the masses; 1988 Libertarian Presidential nominee Ron Paul votes no on anything that isn't specifically enumerated in the Constitution. Even without directly mentioning the Constitution, the right-libertarian Cato Institute talks about "the principles of the American Revolution--individual liberty, limited government, the free market, and the rule of law." Over and over again, the modern day libertarian movement turns to our founding document as a patriotic reassurance that they are in the right. Yet they are unable to overcome a simple problem: the Constitution is not a libertarian document.

To equate libertarianism with the classical liberalism that influenced our Founding Fathers is a philosophical error. While no doubt many classical liberals call themselves libertarians today, the modern movement has been heavily influenced by Austrian economics and Murray Rothard and takes a far more negative view of the state than the old men with wigs who wrote the Constitution. Even the minarchists who stop short of outright anarchism and the abolition of the state would have been seen as the most radical of radicals in the early Republic; they would have made the Locofocos look mainstream. John Locke, Adam Smith and the rest of the classical liberal gang did express a mistrust of state power and its granting of monopolistic privilege, but they also supported a state for the maintenance of law and order in the face of natural anarchy. A quick glance at the Constitution reveals that the Founding Fathers, far from consistently favoring a system that viewed the state as a necessary evil, saw a role for government to "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

The minarchist may still argue that these broad general principles are fully compatible with a limited government favored by modern day libertarians. But the Constitution is also the source for Congress's power to lay excises (the ancestor to our modern day sin taxes), to lay tariffs and regulate commerce (protectionism), to borrow money and therefore establish a national debt (say goodbye to balanced budgets), to establish post offices and post roads (see my previous complaints about this monopolistic agency), and to grant patents and copyrights. Even a strict interpretation of the Constitution would grant the government powers that libertarians today complain about.

General welfare, that loosely defined term that continues to drive libertarians crazy in discussing constitutional interpretations, was a very real concept to these classical liberals. The patent system is one example of how government intervention in creating monopolistic privilege was justified because of its positive impact on the general welfare. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," Congress was granted the ability to grant patents and copyrights. While this was undoubtedly an intrusion into the free market, it was seen as a proper role of government in promoting the general welfare through encouraging science. Overtime, of course, the argument would develop that inventors had some type of "intellectual property right" to a patent, but that was hardly the focus of the Founding Fathers. Far from being a political Garden of Eden, the original Constitution was itself a fall from libertarian utopia. While L. Neil Smith sees the Constitution itself as the original sin with the Articles of Confederation the libertarian Garden of Eden, it is more realistic to accept that the Founding Fathers and the newly independent states that they represented were not libertarian.

Other libertarians try to place the fall from grace at the Civil War, when President Lincoln and his Radical Republican Congress implemented a host of statist policies ranging from protectionism to massive transportation subsidies to well connected businessmen. Yet one can hardly defend the antebellum republic as libertarian given the system of slavery. The Constitution did nothing to change this, it in fact solidified by including Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3: "No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due." And how do we view the track record of expansionism? President Madison started an avoidable war in an attempt to seize control of Canada, while President Polk provoked war with Mexico to fulfill Manifest Destiny. Part of the fame of Andrew Jackson was his role in seizing control of Florida as General, without Congressional approval it should be noted. John Anthony Quitman and William Walker were less successful in their own filibustering expeditions. Interventionism seems to have a long history in American history, and I can only guess how liberventionists who today cheer on the Iraq War in the name of "liberty" would react to my criticisms of the expansion of our republic.

The United States of America has never had a libertarian government, assuming there can be such a thing. The existence of legal slavery ought to rule out the antebellum republic, regardless of how limited its financial resources were compared to the nation as a whole. It seems to me that only the critics of libertarianism and vulgar corporate apologists who like the idea of monopolies running the economy attempt to argue that the Gilded Age was libertarian. And once you get up into the Progressive Era, no one, not even critics of libertarianism will make such a claim, although I do think we somehow always end up getting blamed for the Great Depression. Of course, other critics (or even the very same that will in another breath point out that we've tried libertarianism) will also say that libertarianism is a utopian scheme because it's never been done before. I've never seen someone eat their cake and have it too, but it seems like people keep trying anyway. It is no fault of libertarianism and the strength of its ideas that it hasn't been tried before, if anything the constant failures provided by statism should encourage us to try something new.

Libertarianism is something new, there is nothing classical about it. As I illustrated above, the classically liberal constitution granted Congress the explicit ability to grant patents and lay tariffs, two of the four cornerstones of privilege and statism according to Benjamin Tucker. And it left unchallenged the system of privilege in the land and money monopolies, although the period of free banking in the antebellum republic probably did come close to breaking the latter. By opposing the statist status quo, the libertarian movement no doubt appeals to those that still have a classically liberal view of politics. But the libertarian movement is larger than just that, it holds a radically skeptical view of government's ability to promote the general welfare without creating privilege and inequality. Following through this critique of government to its natural ends arguable will result in anarchist conclusions, but libertarianism still has the perception of being minarchist. I don't think it matters if libertarianism advertises itself as explicitly minarchist or anarchist, the critique of government is the founding principle and it is what distinguishes it from classical liberalism.

Much as modern day Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism developed out of radically different Temple Judaism over two millennium ago, modern day liberalism and libertarianism share a similar ancestry. But ancestry does not mean that they are one and the same, libertarianism has expanded on classical liberalism's critique of government while modern liberalism has instead focused on classical liberalism's belief in democracy and the ability to govern with a mind toward the common good. Classical liberalism held both of these seemingly paradoxical principles, with some followers leaning more toward one or the other. Following the abortive attempt by Hamilton and the Federalists to establish a truly conservative society in the Americas, most of our political debate has been within the range of liberalism. While adopting some of the programs of Hamilton, the American System of Clay was designed to encourage broad economic growth and intensification, not a new aristocratic elite. This is illustrated by Clay and the Whigs favoring high tariffs, which would have a widespread impact in benefiting all domestic manufacturers of the protected good, in contrast to Hamilton's support for subsidies and bounties that, like today's agricultural subsidies, would benefit larger producers at the expense of the small independent artisan.

Libertarianism is not a fetish worship of liberty, nor is it clinging to our Constitution as an ideal document. It is intellectually dishonest to claim classical liberalism as our own and modern liberalism as some form of a bastard son, both movement can claim classical liberalism as an influence. Focusing on rolling back the clock to 1859 or 1800 is not libertarian, it is both radical and conservative in clinging to the past as better than our present condition. A libertarianism oriented toward the future must be honest about its origins and the history of our republic. Having done so, it will be better prepared to meet the challenges of tomorrow.