Thank you for a carefully worded and very accurate correction to the sometimes wild assertions about limited government that show up on this forum. The idea that the founding fathers would have been OK with—or tolerated in law—some of the perversity we now take for granted in the USA is simply ludicrous.
Why thank you.
I’m not completely averse to the idea that our present society should be more libertarian than that of the Founders.
But the idea that the Constitution spells out their ideas for ordering society is ludicrous. It was much more about protecting the power of the states than it was about protecting the rights of individuals versus both the state and federal governments.
There were remarkably few limitations in the original Constitution on the powers of the states with regard to their own citizens.