President Obama recently said that we all need to show the same spirit and courage as the Founders of this great country. I’m glad to say that on this point, the President and I actually agree. I only hope he’ll follow his own advice.

Alexander the Great is said to have remarked that the reason the peoples of Asia had for so long been slaves was that they never learned how to say “no,” and in that story lies the soul of what made the Founders of this country so great. When writing what would become the Constitution of the United States and given the chance to seize total power for themselves, they said “no”.

For at least the last 50 years, one of the central tenets of conservatism has been less government. We’ve decried government as the problem rather than the answer, and even in some cases as evil. However, perhaps conservatives as of late have been straying from the mark, and their Republicans counterparts in Congress have abandoned it completely.

Government agencies and institutions themselves aren’t the problem. The problem is people.

I don’t say politicians are the problem because at the end of the day, they aren’t any different from you and I. Power, as Edmund Burke said, corrupts. Any one of us, if given power over our neighbor will eventually be carried away by our own pride and vanity and make our neighbor’s decisions for them, supposing that we know best.

Governments don’t create freedom; freedom was ours to begin with, something the Declaration of Independence and Constitution recognized. Governments, people in power, just take it away. This doesn’t come from some cruel, meddling impulse; rather, it’s often done with the best of intentions.

During the Great Depression, the government entered the private sector to rebuild the economy, but in the process robbed Americans of their freedoms on an unprecedented level.

Take farmers. Suddenly farmers no longer had the freedom to decide what or how much of a certain crop to grow, the decision belonged to a bureaucrat hundreds or thousands of miles away. If a farmer exceeded their quota, fines may result. Correctly believing that they were being robbed of their freedom, some farmers fought all the way to the Supreme Court, only to have bureaucrats in robes rule that the government had done nothing wrong. 

And why do conservatives argue for tax cuts rather than spending bills? Because either way the money’s yours, it’s just a matter of who's better at spending your money: you or that politician in a capital far, far away?

The beauty and genius of the government the Founder’s intended was that it was designed to be limited. They knew that without limitations, the government would grow and grow, and as the state increased, the individual and his freedom would decrease. 

President Obama seems to have acknowledged that genius. I hope he’ll abide by it.

Chris is a law student at Wake Forest University.