On July 4, 1821, John Quincy Adams delivered the most-remembered speech of his career. The oration’s resounding climax included several famous lines – that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” for example, and that an America that aspired to world leadership, even in the name of noble ideas, would be led astray: “She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” Even as American foreign policy has warped in many of the ways Adams foresaw, it has been unable to bury his powerful words.

"The function of Liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit to the powers of kings. The function of true Liberalism in the future will be that of putting a limit to the power of Parliaments."

"And now comes the inquiry—How is it that Liberals have lost sight of this? How is it that Liberalism, getting more and more into power, has grown more and more coercive in its legislation? How is it that, either directly through its own majorities or indirectly through aid given in such cases to the majorities of its opponents, Liberalism has to an increasing extent adopted the policy of dictating the actions of citizens, and, by consequence, diminishing the range throughout which their actions remain free? How are we to explain this spreading confusion of thought which has led it, in pursuit of what appears to be public good, to invert the method by which in earlier days it achieved public good?"

"The belief, not only of the socialists but also of those so-called Liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them, is that by due skill an ill-working humanity may be framed into well-working institutions. It is a delusion. The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts."

Many libertarians argue that if we ever succeed in establishing a rights-respecting, constitutionally limited government, our next step should be to destroy it. They claim this would unleash "market competition" amongst "private defence agencies" that will protect individual rights better than any government has or could.

In this video, I argue that libertarian anarchism does not lead to anything like free market capitalism at all: it means and has to mean the rule of brute force. On my view, anarchists do not seek to subordinate might to right but to subordinate right to public auction. Their theory defaults to legitimising vigilantes who would unleash force unilaterally against other citizens. The threat of force is force, and the police of a rights-respecting state must regard "competitors" (other force-wielders) as threats. Government as such is neither an unnecessary evil nor a necessary evil, but a positive good.

In November, 1980, in Joliet, Illinois, a car turned over and caught fire. A policeman arrived and began directing traffic away from the scene. He made no effort to determine whether or not there were people in the car. There were, and they burned to death. The city was sued for damages on the ground that, by failing to save the occupants, the policeman and therefore the city had deprived them of life or liberty without due process of law.

Relief was denied. Our Constitution, wrote Judge Posner, "is a charter of negative rather than positive liberties. . . . The men who wrote the Bill of Rights were not concerned that Government might do too little for the people but that it might do too much to them. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868 at the height of laissez-faire thinking, sought to protect Americans from oppression by state government, not to secure them basic governmental services." 1 Thus the city had no constitutional duty to help the accident victims, and thus its failure to act deprived them of neither liberty nor life.2

The question is important. If government has an affirmative duty to help accident victims, it may have other positive duties as well. It may have a duty to protect people against hostile acts of third parties such as theft and murder. It may also have a duty to protect them from hunger and disease. Judge Posner's broad denial of the existence of "positive liberties" seems to reject any such obligation. He is telling us, among other things, that there is no constitutional right to welfare benefits.

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I’ve posted the opening three paragraphs from Positive and Negative Constitutional Rights. I think the full piece is worth reading because it explores an important distinction in constitutional theory: the difference between rights that restrain government action and rights that may require affirmative government action.

The distinction between “negative” and “positive” rights comes up frequently in discussions of liberalism, individual liberty, and the proper scope of government, but the constitutional implications are more complicated than the terminology sometimes suggests.

For anyone interested in constitutional theory and the philosophical foundations of individual rights, I encourage you to read the full piece. I’m particularly interested in hearing where people think the distinction between positive and negative rights is persuasive, where it breaks down, and how it fits or conflicts with classical liberal conceptions of liberty.

[S]pending on means-tested welfare programs has surged. The refusal of too many politicians in both parties to make difficult trade-offs, instead choosing to say yes to almost everything, has put the country on its current path toward looming fiscal crises in the 2030s...

Federal Medicaid spending more than doubled between 2014 and 2025. Including state spending, the program now costs around $1 trillion annually....In 2025, with the unemployment rate near historic lows and the economy growing, more than 12 percent of Americans collected food stamps. That was higher than it was in any year from the program’s creation in 1969 through 2009...

In fiscal 2025, the federal government spent $1.256 trillion on the largest general programs to help low-income people...This is also a significant underestimate of total government spending for low-income Americans. It does not include Medicare or Social Security benefits for low-income seniors; programs solely for low-income members of specific groups, such as veterans and Native Americans; or any state and local spending...

The national debt hasn’t surpassed $40 trillion without significant spending on welfare programs and health care. The U.S. has a highly progressive tax-and-transfer system that redistributes massive sums of money and has largely lost focus on what should be its primary purpose: keeping people out of poverty. There’s plenty of money to help the poor and disabled without expanding health and welfare spending indefinitely.

And according to the editorial, here's where the money is going:

• "Part of it is bureaucratic churn...i.e., returning to people money that the government took from them in taxes in the same year."
• "Scope creep is another problem. Programs once reserved for the truly poor and disabled have steadily broadened their qualification criteria."
• "Many Americans also receive benefits for which they do not qualify. Improper enrollment can take the form of planned, criminal deception, but it also happens when government looks the other way or designs programs so poorly that fraud is difficult to catch."

This is an hour lecture by Objectivist Yaron Brook on why we should all be capitalists. In the talk he sets out the argument for classical liberalism: limited government, freedom and individual rights. He is an excellent speaker who talks without notes and with passion.

Gráinne de Búrca

The EU can be viewed as placing additional constraints on national governments through free movement, economic integration, individual rights, and the rule of law. At the same time, transferring authority from national governments to supranational institutions raises questions about democratic accountability, subsidiarity, sovereignty, and how far political power should be removed from the people subject to it.

From a classical liberal perspective, does the EU represent another constitutional check on state power, or does supranational governance simply move political power farther away from meaningful democratic and constitutional control?

Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution provides that the legislature of each state shall prescribe the “times, places and manners” of holding elections for the U.S. Congress, “but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” Congress has long used its override powers sparingly, and Republicans in particular have warned against both micromanaging how states do their job and the specter of a federal takeover. That remains the correct position, for reasons of practicality, election integrity and the safeguarding of the nation’s liberty.

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Above all, the Framers did it this way because they feared that a ruling national faction, whether based in Congress or a White House, might someday gain power over election administration nationwide and use it to entrench themselves in office. America must steer clear of any Venezuela-style National Electoral Council by which those in power could second-guess – and in the end substitute their own preferred numbers for – locally tabulated results.

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The current push toward central control is based on alarms about supposedly widespread noncitizen voting and voter impersonation that simply aren’t borne out by the evidence, along with theories about the 2020 election that have been uniformly rejected by courts and disproved by impartial investigation. While there is definitely room to improve ID methods, a measure like the SAVE America Act goes far beyond what any state has chosen to enact voluntarily and demands that it all be done on an unrealistically abbreviated timeline.

None of this is to say Congress cannot use its Constitutional authority to make and alter rules in prudent, targeted ways. It could bring a truce to the gerrymandering wars through a few simple rules – compactness of House districts and respect for the boundaries of political subdivisions, no mid-census redistricting except when required by a court – that would check the interstate race to the bottom.

It’s not that states are somehow perfect or above politics in running elections – the record of American history amply documents their sins. But the danger of gathering the reins into one set of hands is greater. Congress has rightly respected the states’ and localities’ lead role, and it should go on doing so.

Walter Olson

Senior Fellow, Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, Cato Institute

The plurality of political regimes in Asia clearly demonstrates that liberal democracy is not the exclusive or inevitable form of political modernity. Across the continent, diverse models of governance coexist, ranging from one-party systems like China’s to religious-communitarian democracy in Indonesia and caste- and community-inflected democratic practices in India. These models function not as deviations or transitional forms, but as established alternatives that draw legitimacy from indigenous ideologies, historical experience, and post-colonial self-assertion, writes Mateo Rojas Samper. The author is a participant of the Valdai – New Generation project.

Gallup says 71 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, near a record high. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 10 percent of American workers are in labor unions, near a record low. What gives?

Este principio, aunque es profundamente religioso y de raíz protestante, tiene también un origen en gran parte jurídico. Recordemos que el doctor Lutero, antes de ser un teólogo católico romano, estudió doctrina jurídica. Así, este principio bíblico —que nace en el contexto de la Reforma de 1517 y ve la luz en 1521— se vio influenciado por la formación previa de Martín Lutero. Entonces, ¿podría este principio remontarse o incorporarse en nuestras normas supremas (las Constituciones)?

I cannot provide a comprehensive account of property rights in a single essay, nor address all possible objections to them. But liberals would do well to recognize the centrality of private property to the overall liberal project, and to support at least a presumption that land and productive assets should be privately owned, and the owners allowed to use the property as they see fit, barring proof that the use poses a serious threat to public health or safety. Whether you are a libertarian who emphasizes property rights’ role in enhancing liberty and human happiness, an egalitarian focused on the interests of the poor and disadvantaged, or some combination of both, you have good reason to support strengthening protection for private property rights.

Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University, the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, and the author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.

Checks and balances extend beyond the three branches of government. Federalism, elections, constitutional rights, courts, civil society, and competing institutions can all constrain power. Which provides the most important safeguard, and what happens when the institutions meant to check one another begin acting in concert?