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Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals — that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government — that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.

“The Nature of Government”
The Virtue of Selfishness, 114

Ours was the first government based on and strictly limited by a written document — the Constitution — which specifically forbids it to violate individual rights or to act on whim. The history of the atrocities perpetrated by all the other kinds of governments — unrestricted governments acting on unprovable assumptions — demonstrates the value and validity of the original political theory on which this country was built.

“Censorship: Local and Express”
Philosophy: Who Needs It, 181

A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to make a society free and to keep it free — a system that does not depend on the motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.

The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the government.

“The Nature of Government”
The Virtue of Selfishness, 113

The clause giving Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce is one of the major errors in the Constitution. That clause, more than any other, was the crack in the Constitution’s foundation, the entering wedge of statism, which permitted the gradual establishment of the welfare state. But I would venture to say that the framers of the Constitution could not have conceived of what that clause has now become. If, in writing it, one of their goals was to facilitate the flow of trade and prevent the establishment of trade barriers among the states, that clause has reached the opposite destination.

“Censorship: Local and Express”
Philosophy: Who Needs It, 184
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