… is from page 213 of Robert Higgs’s important July 1987 Reason article titled “In the Name of Emergency,” as an expanded version of this article appears under the title “The Normal Constitution Versus the Crisis Constitution” in the superb 2004 collection of some of Bob’s essays, Against Leviathan:
The Normal Constitution can be preserved against the inroads of the Crisis Constitution only if the politically influential elites who make policies and mold the opinions of the masses are willing to resist the passions of national emergency.
DBx: Yes. But I fear that governments’ – and the media’s – experience during covid has only further whetted their appetites to exercise more power ostensibly for the purpose of protecting the masses from some great calamity.
