The Principle
History has deemed the early part of the 20th century in America as the Progressive Era and the amendments made to the Constitution during that time as the Progressive Amendments. These labels are rubbish. The so-called “Progressive” Era was in fact quite the opposite. Of the four amendments of the Progressive Era, only one, the 19th, which gave women the right to vote represented a decision consistent with the liberty whose creation was the great progressive accomplishment of the creation of this country. The other three represent a regression.
The 16th, 17th, and 18th Amendments take us in spirit back to before the progress made by our Constitution. They deny the liberty on which our nation was founded and remove the institutional safeguards of this liberty. This is no progress! The founding of our nation was a first. We were an example of liberal democracy for the entire world to see. We were a showcase of freedom, and a beautiful institutional model for insuring that freedom would remain. Over the past 200 years, however, we have slowly and methodically begun to destroy every institutional safeguard of freedom we have, abandoning the progress made by our Constitution.

We were smart enough to realize our mistake with the 18th Amendment, which enacted prohibition, and our 21st Amendment repealed it. My fear, however, is that the reason we repealed this amendment, and the reason we cringe at it today is not because of the violation of liberty it represents, but because it just didn’t work, or perhaps because we think there’s nothing wrong with drinking. It’s not the violation of liberty that scares people, it’s that this violation of liberty didn’t work, or it’s that drinking isn’t a big deal. And that is backwards.
The 16th and 17th Amendments, however, we never had the good sense to repeal. The 16th Amendment allows the federal government to enact an income tax without apportioning it among the states, and the 17th allows for the direct election of senators. Together, these destroy a key safeguard of our liberty. The great progressive accomplishment of our Constitution was the creation of a limited, federal government, in which splitting powers among different branches, and splitting sovereignty among state governments and the federal government insured that too much power would never be in one set of hands. The Regressive Amendments, as I cannot but call them, abandoned this scheme. They set the stage for a larger, more central government by abandoning key safeguards of state sovereignty. The national income tax and the direct election of senators removed some of the key ways states could impact the federal system.
So-called Progressives like to think that these changes make the federal government more directly accountable to the people. Perhaps it did this in some sense, but it did so at the expense of giving the federal government more direct control over the people. And this abandons the great progress of our Constitutional federalism. The great progressive accomplishment of our Constitution was its assurance of a highly limited government, which stemmed from an understanding that government can’t and shouldn’t solve all society’s problems. But we have long since reverted to a pre-liberal view of government. And we see the fruit of this today in our gigantic, out-of-control government. The great lie of the Twentieth century is that government is the solution to all our problems. From the so-called Progressive Era, through the New-Deal, and Great Society we’ve been told that this vision of government as our savior is new and better than what came before. But 20th century socialism (whether it names itself such or not) is not as different as it likes to think from the absolutism that preceded classical liberalism. We used to be foolish enough to think that kings had a divine right to power over their subjects, and thus the duty to care for them as their children. Then we grew up and realized that individuals are responsible to live their lives, and government exists to ensure they can do so without interference from others. The Progressive of the 20th century is in fact an inane and backwards Regressivism which tells us once again of a sort of divine right, this time of the state, to direct our lives.
So, all that said, over my next couple of posts I plan to examine in depth the particular problems created by the 16th, 17th, and 18th Amendments. So if you feel like in this post I haven’t really adequately delved into the problems created by these Amendments, then stay tuned for more.