"We need to beware the hysterical cries that “something must be done!” about the “crisis” du jour. For when the crisis passes, more of our freedom will have gone with it."

Bruce Thornton writes in Frontpage Magazine,

...just as during war we have seen Constitutional rights temporarily suspended, as Lincoln did habeas corpus during the Civil War, or as Wilson did free speech rights during World War I, so too the progressives have been eager to limit our rights in order to keep such “obsolete and indefensible notions,” as progressive historian Charles Beard over a century ago described natural rights, from interfering with the progressives’ implementation of their utopian ambitions. So today we see calls to limit the First Amendment’s rights protecting speech and religion, or the Second’s right to keep and bear arms.

Our Constitutional mechanisms by design are cumbersome because the Founders’ primary aim was to defend political freedom, both of individuals and the states, from a centralized and concentrated power that inevitably seeks to expand at the expense of freedom. That’s why the progressives want to dismantle the Constitution’s checks and balances that limit power, and in the name of efficiency, justice, and equality, empower and expand technocratic elites who supposedly know better than individuals, families, communities, and the market what’s best.

We need to beware the hysterical cries that “something must be done!” about the “crisis” du jour. For when the crisis passes, more of our freedom will have gone with it.

Read more here.