A rather delayed and mildly intemperate response.

One thing I am not saying is that the United States is, or should be, a direct democracy, the deduction of your charge against me. As you know, federal taxation is not determined by a majority vote of the electorate, though in a state like California, where I live, tax laws have both been passed and altered through ill-advised direct-democratic referenda that have played their own part in royally mucking up the budget and economics of California State government.

You seem to conflate the whole matter of freedom with taxation. Make of that what you will.

Of course, there are unacceptable extremes regarding tax rates. Those extremes would be identified not as a fixed percentage, but in a calculus of what services and responsibilities Americans wish to be performed and assumed by government, and their cost, together with the amount of their income retained by themselves Americans will think necessary to the continued exercise of their independence in life. According to the CBO, from 1981-2006, the effective federal tax rate for the middle quintile (all others are similarly so) has been in steady decline from 19.7% to 14.2%. I understand that you think Obama administration policies will reverse this trend, but based on the rates and the pattern, your apparent hysteria about a loss of freedom due to excess taxation is remarkably ill-founded.

Most importantly, the words of mine you quote – my own partial reformulation of Hamilton’s – assert that the most important protection against tyranny and a loss of freedom is not in particular policies, but in the foundations – our constitutional foundations – of government. I should think this a position that a conservative would embrace. Of course, ultimately, majorities of one form or another choose our governmental leaders, and majorities among them pass laws, which are sometimes upheld or struck down by majorities of judges, all in accordance with human understanding – and divergences thereof – of constitutional foundations and protections of minority rights. And this is always going to leave some percentage of the population unsupportive of some policy or set of policies, which they have the opportunity through the electoral process to alter. It’s happened a few times recently. That’s democracy.

So, basically you’re saying that the principles you outlined were just so much bullshit you threw up as a smokescreen.

Your claim, taken to its logical extreme, is that the Federal government can confiscate 100% of my earnings each year, and dole back out to me some mix of goods and services to which they decide I am “entitled”. This would be acceptable to you because taxation, at any percentage whatsoever, does not constitute a loss of freedom on my part, as long as a majority of voters decide that I must live in a particular fashion which they define as acceptable. The fact that I no longer would have any meaningful control over my own day-to-day life is meaningless to you.

If you do not accept my logical extreme, then what percentage is too much, and why? If you don’t accept my logical extreme, then haven’t you conceded my point that some level of government control over my economic life is dangerous to my freedom?

Personally, I would have thought it obvious that meaningful control over one’s physical life is a necessary prerequisite to any sort of freedom at all.

While I agree that there certainly is a degree of paranoia surrounding some arguments against these policies, it is true that enacting them on the Federal level is against the Constitution. The document is very specific about what the federal government is allowed to do, and just to make the point more clear, the tenth amendment plainly says that any power not listed (or expressly banned from the states) is the sole property of the states and are barred from the federal government. This is not the first policy to go against this rule, and I doubt it would be the last.

There is some concern in wondering where it will end. I do not mean to suggest that we’re on the very edge of losing all freedom, as that is still a long way off – but there is a need to hold Congress accountable to hand over powers that do not belong to them while those powers are still relatively minor. The larger the power that needs taken away from them, the harder it would be to remove it. Are we to wait and see if they do take all power away from us before calling them out, and if so, how could we be expected to accomplish anything if they do? It’s entirely possible that they never will, but I see no reason we should be expected to sit, wait, and see. It is better to act against such behaviors while there is little or no immediate threat than to allow such mentalities to continue and grow until there is.