The Heroic Gene Healy on the 14th Amendment: “If this be heresy—then make the most of it!”

Update: For related posts:

• Libertarian Centralists
• The Libertarian Case Against the Fourteenth Amendment
• Healy on States’ Rights and Libertarian Centralists; Healy versus Bolick and the Institute for Justice
• Judicial Activism and the Presumption of Unconstitutionality (draft, 2005)
• Doherty on Slaughterhouse, Libertarian Centralism, and the Fourteenth Amendment
• The Heroic Gene Healy on the 14th Amendment: “If this be heresy—then make the most of it!”
• Incorporation and the Fourteenth Amendment: The 140 Year Old “Riddle”

He writes:

Pilon sees in the Fourteenth Amendment an effective check on such abuses. I see it as a source of further abuses. Collectivists in Congress and on the federal bench will seize on the expansive construction of the amendment Pilon urges to subvert the very liberties he seeks to secure. In so doing, they are unlikely to be restrained by what Pilon views as the proper understanding of the amendment.

Fragmentation of political power, even—perhaps especially—when such power is invoked in the service of our natural rights, is a surer guarantor of liberty than the goodwill of federal legislators and judges. I’d have thought that this was a respectable position for a libertarian to take. But if, as Bolick and McClaughry suggest, this be heresy—then make the most of it.