The Bill of Rights: The Only Good Part of the Constitution

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Mises: The Bill of Rights: The Only Good Part of the Constitution

DECEMBER 17, 2015 Ryan McMaken

This week, the Bill of Rights turns 224 years old. Adopted in 1791 as a consolation prize for the Anti-Federalists, it has been perhaps the most important part of American legal history since the 18th century, and has served as an inconvenient reminder of the laissez-faire libertarian philosophy that permeated American political theory in the late 18th century.

 

Nevertheless, as I noted in "Magna Carta and the Fantasy of Legal Constrainsts on States," words written on parchment do not actually protect anyone's freedoms, and legal constraints on state power are only as good as the ideological backing they receive from the population.

 

Nevertheless, for all its weaknesses, the Bill of Rights — when taken seriously by the general population — has played a part in preserving basic human rights for Americans that were eviscerated in many nations long ago. Thanks to the First Amendment and those who support it, for example, freedom of speech is often more respected in the United States than is almost any place one might hold up as an example. One can be arrested and imprisoned for saying unpopular things in France and Germany, to just name two examples. (And we're not even considering the far more illiberal states of Asia.)