Sublime

People seek government action because they don’t approve of what other people choose to do with their lives. They want to overrule the decisions others have made concerning the uses of their own time and money. It generally works this way: The individuals in Group A want something that requires the cooperation of Group B. But they can’t (or won’t)

This action of individual exertions, joined to that of the public authorities, frequently performs what the most energetic central administration would be unable to execute.

Any individual in the General Market can give to the poor, pay for someone else’s schooling, donate money to foreign governments, or hire protection. It isn’t his choice he’s concerned about when he wants the government to do those things. It’s someone else’s choice that he’s trying to overrule.

Nevertheless local assemblies of citizens constitute the strength of free nations. Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it. A

Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to