Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [41]
But the wrong government—a centralized authority of one or more rulers—is destructive of the individual’s liberty and the civil society. “For he being supposed to have all, both legislative and executive, power in himself alone, there is no judge to be found, no appeal lies open to anyone, who may fairly and indifferently, and with authority decide, and from whence relief and redress may be expected of any injury or inconveniency that may be suffered from him, or by his order.… That whereas, in the ordinary state of Nature, he has a liberty to judge of his right, according to the best of his power to maintain; but whenever his property is invaded by the will and order of his monarch, he has not only no appeal, as those in society ought to have, but, as if he were degraded from the common state of rational creatures, is denied a liberty to judge of, or defend his right, and so is exposed to all the misery and inconveniences that a man can fear from one, who being in the unrestrained state of Nature, is yet corrupted with flattery and armed with power” (7, 91). “For he that thinks absolute power purifies men’s blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read but the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced to the contrary” (7, 92). Locke is not only repudiating Hobbes’s notion of an omnipotent Sovereign, but the philosopher-kings in Plato’s Republic.
Locke argued for a representative government but warned that it, too, required restraints, for all forms of government are self-perpetuating. “The great end of men’s entering into society being the enjoyment of their properties in peace and safety, and the great instrument and means of that being the laws established in that society, the first and fundamental positive law of all commonwealths is the establishing of the legislative power, as the first and fundamental natural law which is to govern even the legislative” (11, 134). The legislative power “is a power that hath no other end but preservation, and therefore can never have a right to destroy, enslave, or designedly to impoverish the subjects.…” (11, 135)
Morever, the legislature has as its task to uphold and secure man’s inalienable rights, be informed by the governed, be free of corruption, and constrain itself. “Thus the law of Nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others. The rules that they make for other men’s actions must, as well as their own and other men’s actions, be comformable to the law of Nature—i.e., to the will of God, of which that is a declaration, and the fundamental law of Nature being the preservation of mankind, no human sanction can be good or valid against it” (11, 135). “These are the bounds which the trust is put in them by the society and the law of God and Nature have set to the legislative power of every commonwealth, in all forms of government. First: They are to govern by promulgated established laws, not to be varied in particular cases, but to have one rule for rich and poor, for the favorite at Court, and the countryman at plough. Secondly: These laws also ought to be designed for no other end ultimately but the good of the people. Thirdly: They must not raise taxes on the property of the people without the consent of the people given by themselves or their deputies.… Fourthly: Legislative neither must nor can transfer the power of making laws to anybody else, or place it anywhere but where the people have” (11, 142).
Locke explains the necessity of an executive to carry out the laws adopted by the legislature “because those laws which are constantly