Madison’s crossroads

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“It is ironic, I suppose, that a crossroads should be reached in Madison, Wisconsin, a city named for that great patron of limited government James Madison. “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined,” Madison wrote in Federalist 45.

Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

What happens in Madison concerns not only the fate of some whining school teachers, fraud-abetting doctors, and the left-wing activists who are their enablers. It concerns the shape of this country, its hospitableness to liberty, economic growth, and individual autonomy. It was a battle Madison fought and won in the 1770s. But the price of freedom, as Madison’s rival and colleague Thomas Jefferson observed, is “eternal vigilance.” Our stupendous affluence and power has lulled us into complacency and public profligacy.  It is time to wake up. “Two roads diverge in a yellow wood”: you cannot, as Frost put it in his famous poem, take both and be one traveller. Which will it be?”

by Roger Kimball, Watershed Moment in Wisconsin

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