I like Professor Walter E. Williams a lot, but he left out a critical factor. The United States was supposed to be a constitutional republic. When we stopped limiting FedGov to the constitutionally enumerated powers, we lost a huge limit on FedGov meddling in our lives. It’s not just the anti-majority rules that were supposed to restrain government, the constitutional limits were also supposed to do so.
The last vestige of such limitations died with Wickard v. Filburn, when the Supreme Court decided that growing wheat for your own personal consumption could be regulated as interstate commerce because growing your own grain would reduce your personal demand for interstate grain. That was an insane decision, and that, followed by the decision that Obamacare was constitutional because it’s a tax drove the final nails into the coffin of limited government. Now the only question is how long we have before FedGov controls our entire economy and every aspect of our lives.
From Wickard v. Filburn: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/317/111 “The wheat marketing quota and attendant penalty provisions of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, as amended by the Act of May 26, 1941, when applied to wheat not intended in any part for commerce but wholly for consumption on the farm, are within the commerce power of Congress.”
"If you can keep it..."