The United States has the oldest and one of the few constitutions organized around the principles of liberty and limited government. The Founders wrote the Constitution, as they said, “to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” For more than two hundred years, Americans have understood their national enterprise in language of liberty. “Let freedom ring!” they have said, or, more defensively, “Don’t tread on me!” Lincoln spoke of a “new birth of freedom,” Woodrow Wilson of “the New Freedom,” and fdr of “The Four Freedoms.” Equality, though certainly a principle embedded in American life, has yet to displace freedom from its position at the top of our hierarchy of national ideals. When U.S. soldiers go abroad, they are sent to defend freedom, not to promote equality. Even those who wish to expand the role of government often do so in the name of freedom or “rights.”

It is strange, then, to look about in 2011 and see that Americans have built a “big government”—indeed, one that is approaching in size some of those European governments that they formerly denounced as “socialist” or “collectivist.” In the wake of the recent auto and bank bailouts, as well as with the $800 billion “stimulus” package, government spending at all levels in the United States surged to 45 percent of the gross domestic product. This figure is best understood when compared to a postwar average (between 1950 and 2000) of around 36 percent of gdp and an average among