The Era of Big Government Never Ended

Taking stock of the challenges to freedom

Charles Oliver from the January 2007 issue

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Rowley’s essay was first published in 1996. If it had been written in 2006, he could just as aptly have substituted “9/11” for “Oklahoma City.” Since 2001 the most prominent debates on the limits of liberty and the role of the state have come in the context of the War on Terror. Can the government detain U.S. citizens, captured on U.S. soil, indefinitely without pressing charges against them? Should the government be allowed to listen in on telephone calls to or from the United States without court approval?

Many Americans, including some who call themselves libertarians, have answered “yes” to such questions. Some have even fretted that the government isn’t doing enough to curtail liberties in the name of fighting terror. But there’s nary a mention of warrantless wiretaps or data mining or extraordinary renditions in the index of this book.

And with good reason. About three-quarters of the essays were originally published in 2001 or earlier. I realize there’s a certain amount of lag time in publishing a book. But it’s difficult to see how anyone could publish a volume on current challenges to liberty that almost completely ignores the continuing resurgence of the national security state.

For that reason, many of the more philosophical essays, such as Rowley’s or Buchanan’s, have a more urgent feel to them than the ones that focus on “present day” policy concerns—say, James R. Otteson’s discussion of “Freedom of Religion and Public Schooling,” which is a perfectly fine essay but of a type libertarians have been writing for decades. The challenge of liberty in the near future will be to show how those philosophical arguments about liberty and order, freedom and safety, bear on current debates regarding the powers assumed by the government in the War on Terror.

Contributing Editor Charles Oliver ([e-mail]) writes for a daily newspaper in Georgia.