Black Armbands for “Constitution Day”

Today is the 223rd anniversary of the adoption of the modern American Constitution, on Sept. 17, 1787. Most Americans are too ignorant to even realize that this followed in the wake of the 1776 Declaration of Independence (on July 2, not July 4, 1776), and the Articles of Confederation adopted in 1781. Or to understand that the Bill of Rights was not adopted until 1791, two years after the Constitution was ratified (in their hysterical devotion to the flaccid Bill of Rights (see The Bad Bill of Rights) and ignorance about the limited powers scheme of the federal government, they would have to believe there were no rights in the two-year period between 1789 and 1791).

Flag-waving yahoos grin like idiots.

Yet, adopting the Official History and hagiography of our constructivist, utopian Founders, they worship the Constitution anyway, even though it was a coup d’état, even though slavery was permitted, even though it was an illegal, unnecessary, centralizing power play by politicians (see Rockwell on Hoppe on the Constitution as Expansion of Government Power), even though it arguably led to the Civil War, WWI, the collapse of western monarchies and the regressive replacement of traditionalist limited monarchy with socialized democracy, WWII, Naziism, Communism, the Holocaust, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (see my When Did the Trouble Start?).

Ironically, today is officially decreed to be “Constitution Day” by the Congress, in an act that is itself unconstitutional since the Constitution does not authorize the Congress to establish any such quasi-religious institutions or observances. The very act of official worship of the Constitution is unconstitutional. How fitting.

Down with the Constitution. What a socialist, centralizing, utopian mistake. It is time for libertarians to stop glorifying early America, the Founders, the Constitution, etc., as proto-libertarian. All states are illegitimate, including America’s. As Lew Rockwell observed in stirring words in his article The Enemy Is Always the State:

Let me state this as plainly as possible. The enemy is the state. There are other enemies too, but none so fearsome, destructive, dangerous, or culturally and economically debilitating. No matter what other proximate enemy you can name — big business, unions, victim lobbies, foreign lobbies, medical cartels, religious groups, classes, city dwellers, farmers, left-wing professors, right-wing blue-collar workers, or even bankers and arms merchants — none are as horrible as the hydra known as the leviathan state. If you understand this point — and only this point — you can understand the core of libertarian strategy.

More info:

• The Nature of the State and Why Libertarians Hate It;
• Was the American Revolution Really about Taxes?;
• Goodbye 1776, 1789, Tom;
• The Bad Bill of Rights;
• Re: Happy Bill of Rights Day — The Problem with the Fourteenth Amendment;
• Jeff Hummel’s “The Constitution as a Counter-Revolution”;
• Rockwell on Hoppe on the Constitution as Expansion of Government Power;
• Bill Marina (R.I.P.) on American Imperialism from the Beginning;
• Happy We-Should-Restore-The-Monarchy-And-Rejoin-Britain Day!;
• Revising the American Revolution;
• The Murdering, Thieving, Enslaving, Unlibertarian Continental Army;
• The Declaration and Conscription;
• ‘Untold Truths About the American Revolution’;
• When Did the Trouble Start?.

About Stephan Kinsella (201 Posts)

Stephan is an attorney and libertarian writer in Houston, Director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF), and the founder and editor of Libertarian Papers. His most recent book is Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (co-editor, with Jörg Guido Hülsmann; Mises Institute, 2009).

Tagged as: Bill Marina, Constitution, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Jeffery Rogers Hummell, Lew Rockwell, Monarchy, slavery