“The notion of collective rights is wholly the invention of the Progressive founders of the administrative state, who were engaged in a self-conscious effort to supplant the principles of limited government embodied in the Constitution. For these Progressives, what Madison and other Founders called the \u201crights of human nature\u201d were merely a delusion characteristic of the 18th century. Science, they held, has proven that there is no permanent human nature\u2014that there are only evolving social conditions. As a result, they regarded what the Founders called the \u201crights of human nature\u201d as an enemy of collective welfare, which should always take precedence over the rights of individuals. For Progressives then and now, the welfare of the people\u2014not liberty\u2014is the primary object of government, and government should always be in the hands of experts. This is the real origin of today\u2019s gun control hysteria\u2014the idea that professional police forces and the military have rendered the armed citizen superfluous; that no individual should be responsible for the defense of himself and his family, but should leave it to the experts. The idea of individual responsibilities, along with that of individual rights, is in fact incompatible with the Progressive vision of the common welfare.<\/p>\n
This way of thinking was wholly alien to America\u2019s founding generation, for whom government existed for the purpose of securing individual rights.”<\/p>\n