The secular faith in centralized power – and the Founders’ answer to it
Government is not omniscient, benevolent, or immutable. It is a collection of fallible people, and the American constitutional system was designed around that uncomfortable fact.
Introduction
Government becomes God when political movements treat it as all-knowing, all-caring and incapable of moral drift.
There is a peculiar contradiction at the heart of much modern collectivist politics. The people most likely to dismiss the idea of an omniscient, benevolent and immutable God can be surprisingly willing to assign those same qualities to government. They doubt providence but trust central planning. They reject divine authority but speak as though the state can see every need, weigh every tradeoff, distribute resources fairly, foresee unintended consequences and remain devoted to the public good regardless of who controls it.
That is not a serious description of government. It is an act of faith.
A necessary qualification comes first. Communism, socialism and progressivism are not interchangeable terms. Socialism contains many schools of thought, and many progressives and socialists are religious. The criticism here is aimed at a recurring impulse, strongest at the radical edge: transfer more decisions from individuals, families and local communities to centralized political authority, then assume that authority will be wiser and more moral than the people it governs.
The Three Divine Qualities Government Does Not Possess
First is omniscience—the belief that government can know enough to make the right decision for millions of different people. No agency can know every family’s priorities, every business’s constraints, every local condition or every consequence of a national rule. Experts can collect data and improve decisions. They cannot eliminate uncertainty, personal bias, incomplete information or the simple fact that circumstances change faster than bureaucracies do.
Second is benevolence—the assumption that public officials will use power only for the public good. Many people enter government for honorable reasons, and some serve exceptionally well. But government has no conscience separate from the people who operate it. Those people bring ambition, pride, ideology, career incentives, donor pressure, tribal loyalties, fear and occasionally corruption. A political system that works only when its leaders are selfless is a system built to fail. That is also the case for legislative term limits: public office should never become a lifetime entitlement or a permanent vehicle for accumulating political power.
Third is immutability—the notion that government will remain steady, principled and dependable. It will not. Administrations reverse one another’s policies. Legislators discover new principles when polling changes. Agencies reinterpret rules. Coalitions break. Today’s permanent promise becomes tomorrow’s budget cut, mandate, waiver or executive order. California’s pension debt is a blunt example of how political promises made today become obligations imposed on taxpayers decades later. Government does not stand outside politics. Government is where politics goes to acquire force.
Government Is People—With the Power to Compel
The centralizing mind often begins with a sensible observation: people can be selfish, shortsighted, prejudiced or reckless. True enough. But then it makes an astonishing leap. It assumes that when some of those same people win elections, receive appointments or take civil-service jobs, their frailties somehow disappear.
They do not disappear. They acquire budgets, regulations, police power and the authority to make their errors compulsory.
Private power can be abused, which is one reason laws and courts are necessary. But public power carries a unique weapon: lawful coercion. A business usually must persuade you. A government can tax, fine, prohibit, seize and imprison. That does not make government evil. It makes government dangerous enough to require strict limits.
The scale matters too. An individual’s bad decision usually harms a limited circle. A bad national policy can impose the same error on hundreds of millions at once. Centralization does not abolish human error. It industrializes it. California’s bullet train is a case study in how political incentives can keep a costly centralized project alive long after its original promises collapse.
The Founders Began With Natural Rights, Not Government Favors
The American founding generation argued bitterly about many things, but the Declaration of Independence placed one principle at the center of the new nation: people possess rights before government exists. The Declaration says human beings are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights and that governments are instituted to secure those rights.
The order matters. Rights come first. Government comes second.
A religious reader may understand that claim literally: rights come from God. A nonreligious reader can still understand its political meaning: fundamental rights do not originate in a legislature, agency, king, president or majority vote. Government does not manufacture them. Government is judged by whether it protects them.
If government grants your rights, then government can redefine, ration or withdraw them. They are no longer rights. They are permissions. The natural-rights tradition puts the citizen above the institution in moral standing and makes government the servant, not the source, of liberty.
A Constitution Written for People, Not Angels
James Madison made the Founders’ realism plain in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” But men are not angels, including the men and women who govern. The constitutional answer was not to search for morally perfect rulers. It was to divide power so that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
That is why the federal government was split into legislative, executive and judicial branches. It is why Congress itself was divided into two chambers. It is why federal authority was separated from state authority, why elections recur, why vetoes and impeachment exist and why officials must operate under a written Constitution.
The system is often slow and frustrating because it was designed to make the concentration of power difficult. Its friction is not always a defect. Much of it is a safety mechanism. A government that can do everything you want quickly can also do everything your opponents want quickly when they take control.
That is the simplest test of any proposed power: Would you still support it if it were exercised by the politician you distrust most? If the answer is no, the power is too broad.
The Bill of Rights Is a Restraining Order
The Bill of Rights is not written as a list of favors Washington generously bestows. Its opening command is “Congress shall make no law.” Other amendments say rights shall not be infringed, that people shall not be deprived of liberty or property without due process and that powers not delegated to the federal government remain with the states or the people.
In plain English, the Bill of Rights tells government to keep its hands off certain parts of human life. Speech, religion, assembly, security in one’s home, due process and other liberties are not safe because public officials are always wise. They are safer because public officials are forbidden from crossing specified lines.
The founding generation was not flawless. The nation tolerated slavery and denied full political standing to millions. That contradiction proves the point: people who write noble principles can still violate them. The answer was to force the nation, through conflict, amendments and law, to apply those rights more honestly and broadly.
The Moral Trap of Central Planning
Centralized programs are usually sold in the language of compassion: people are struggling, markets are imperfect and experts can design something fairer. Sometimes government action is warranted. Limited government does not require anarchy or indifference to suffering.
The trap is believing that compassionate goals guarantee compassionate results. They do not. Every government benefit must be funded, administered, rationed and enforced. My own experience with wasteful spending at the Department of Education showed how bureaucratic incentives can reward spending for its own sake rather than results. Someone decides who qualifies, what is enough and what happens to those who refuse. As decisions move upward, the people affected become less like citizens and more like categories in a program.
Citizens are not omniscient either. But a free society allows different people to try different approaches and correct course. The same principle applies to school choice: families need meaningful alternatives when a centralized system fails to serve their children. A centralized state replaces many imperfect decision-makers with fewer imperfect decision-makers whose mistakes are backed by law.
That is not automatically wiser. It is merely more powerful.
Five Questions Before Giving Government More Power
Before accepting any sweeping political proposal—from the left or the right—citizens should ask five ordinary questions:
• Exactly what power is being transferred to government?
• Who will exercise it, and what incentives will shape that person’s decisions?
• What prevents an opposing administration from using the same power for the opposite purpose?
• Can citizens challenge, refuse, leave or appeal the decision?
• If the policy fails, who bears the cost and who is actually held accountable?
A proposal that cannot survive those questions is not ready to govern a free people. Good intentions are not a substitute for limits, and expertise is not a substitute for consent.
Do Not Build a God Out of Government
The American constitutional tradition does not ask us to hate government. It asks us to see government clearly. Government is necessary because human nature is flawed. Government must be limited for exactly the same reason.
The radical centralizer gets only the first half of that equation. He sees ordinary people’s greed, ignorance and prejudice, then imagines a state somehow cleansed of greed, ignorance and prejudice. But the state is made of ordinary people. There is no purification ritual at the doors of Congress, the White House, a federal agency or city hall.
If someone does not believe in an omniscient, benevolent and immutable God, that is his right. But he should not manufacture one out of agencies, elected officials and executive orders. Washington is not heaven. Statutes are not scripture. Bureaucrats are not angels.
The Founders’ enduring insight was not that Americans would always choose good leaders. It was that no leader should ever be trusted with godlike power. Any political movement that forgets that lesson is not leading the country toward a bold new future. It is reviving the oldest political error in human history: believing that concentrated power will remain wise, kind and obedient once it is finally placed in the right hands.
Sources
Declaration of Independence: A Transcription—National Archives
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
The Bill of Rights: A Transcription—National Archives
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transcript
Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances—Constitution Annotated
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S1-3-1/ALDE_00013290/
Federalist No. 51—The Avalon Project, Yale Law School
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed51.asp
Socialism—Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socialism/
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
