Today is Constitution Day, a Federal holiday to observe the adoption of the United States Constitution. Should people who value individual liberty celebrate today? No. If you support individual liberty, supporting the US Constitution and promoting it as part of your ideals is counterproductive for three reasons:

1. The Constitution lacks legitimacy.

The circumstances under which the Constitution was adopted seem wholly illegitimate by today’s standards. While the Constitution supposedly set up a government that represented the will of the people and relied upon the consent of the governed for legitimacy, a whopping 94% of the population didn’t have a say in the first Presidential election. 6% of Americans, mostly Protestant white males, claimed authority over their fellow humans through this apparatus we call the American government, authorized by the Constitution. There was no consent involved. America, from its very inception, was rule-by-land-owning white males.

The Constitution itself was also completely separate from the will or consent of the people it claimed authority over. Taking advantage of the post-war economic woes fueled by debt and inflation, wealthy elites decided the Articles of Confederation were simply too weak as a basis for the kind of government they wanted. Despite hesitancy about granting the Federal government the power to tax, it was decided that the war debt was simply too enormous to be paid back without taxation. By the mid 1870s, affluent speculators who had acquired many of the securities had a clear financial interest in creating a government that could tax.

Free trade was singled out by one of the Constitution’s designers, Alexander Hamilton, as a defect that could be addressed with a strong Federal government, “one national government would be able, at much less expense, to extend the duties on imports beyond comparison, further than would be practicable to the States separately, or to any partial confederacies.” Politically entrenched elites were again financially interested in the Constitution as a way to outlaw competition and increase domestic profits at the expense of consumers.

The mercantilist class realized a big state was needed to protect their economic power, primarily through restricted trade, privileging domestic business leaders, and the power to tax, privileging wealthy securities holders. The Constitutional Convention sounds like a room full of Donald Trumps with slightly worse hair pieces.

2. The Constitution is a failure.

As I wrote a year ago it is, ” responsible for creating the beginnings of the centralized, corporatist, tyrannical bureaucracy we see today.” While the Constitution, in writing, places all these limits to the power of the Federal government, real-life governments don’t work that way. Legislators are not interested in upholding an old piece of paper. They, like the Constitution’s framers, are self-interested individuals in a position of power and they will pander and govern in ways that give them more power and money.

The Constitution wasn’t enough to maintain the utopian dream of a minarchist government and calls for returning to it are unrealistic. A piece of paper is not a real institutional check on power and it will never be enough to restrain the bloodthirsty iron fist of the state. Minarchism is a failed experiment. Looking at other forms of governance is a more hopeful alternative.

3. The Constitution lacks authority.

Even if the Constitution was adopted under legitimate conditions, and even if it wasn’t a failure, it still lacks moral authority over anyone living today. 146 years ago, legal theorist and abolitionist, Lysander Spooner argued against the idea that the Constitution has just authority over people living today:

The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago.

I wasn’t even alive when the Constitution was adopted. Why am I morally obliged to follow it let alone celebrate its adoption? I’ve never signed to it. No one from the government has even asked me what I thought about the document. What possible moral claim could a piece of paper that was written up 228 years ago by people I’ve never met in a city a thousand miles from where I live have on me? For those interested in consensual human relationships and the individual’s liberty do to as they please without infringing on the right of others to do the same, the Constitution is nothing but a two-century old fraud perpetuated for generations through Federal holidays and other mysticism that propagates the idea that this old piece of hemp as anything whatsoever to do with your life.

The Constitution won’t liberate any of us. It won’t bring about a free society. It won’t safeguard individual liberty – it never has. Freedom lovers ought to be looking to the future and the unlimited potential of human liberty for hope, not glorifying two century old documents that were framed by a tiny, wealthy faction of society. The future of freedom will be found in 2015, not 1787.

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