"Liberty" has become the poor relation among the rights and aims laid out in our Founding documents: the Declaration's "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness," and those of the Constitution's Preamble, namely, "secur(ing) the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

Liberty was central to the Founders' aspirations, not secondary. For them it was the essence of self-government. Lose liberty and self-government itself would disappear. So the Founders sought to create a republic that would secure it, protect it, and perpetuate it over time, something that had never been done.
Now, after more than 200 years of our experiment in self-government, "liberty" is rarely used in public discussion, except during celebrations of the Fourth of July or among conservatives.

For many Americans the word must seem as quaint as tri-corner hats and fife-and-drum corps playing "Yankee Doodle."

What has happened, of course, is that "freedom" has replaced "liberty" in most public discussion. Look in a dictionary and the two words are synonyms. But in the American experience they do not mean the same thing.

Liberty carries additional, studied weight. This historic heft is made up of the events, writings and debates that produced the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, the Declaration and the Constitution, including the Federalist and anti-Federalist papers and thousands of letters and other essays.

The scarcity of "liberty" in public debate in fact signals a real and growing problem. Liberty — or "freedom" — is rapidly losing hold as an anchor of our public life, of the proper and limited ends of our self-government, and the means we use to achieve them. ("We need to pass the bill to see what is in it," is a sign of where we're tending, and is not a good omen for what is supposed to be a free people and their self-government.)

The Founders gave us this truth: While they believed that government was necessary to secure and perpetuate liberty, they also believed that government would always be a threat to liberty.

All human experience had made that clear.

The radical orator and pamphleteer Thomas Paine, the poet of "These are the times that try men's souls," put the prudent fear of government most boldly: "Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in the best state, is but a necessary evil."

Amen!

Yes, civilized people must have government to do those limited things they cannot do alone. Yes, government is necessary for liberty itself. But government is an evil in that its appetite — the appetites of many of the ambitious people who occupy its many offices — is for more power in more areas of our lives and for more taxes.

James Madison cast the threat in practical and philosophical terms in Federalist 51. He pointed out the proposed Constitution's internal checks on the central government, and noted that: "It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature: If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

Madison was pleased that a "double security" would protect liberty in the "compound republic of America:" The states would be a check on the central government.

The Bill of Rights grew out of concerns that the central government would pillage liberty.

Let me stress again: The Founders feared government's likely depredations even as they created a government capable of governing.

This prudent fear was as central to the Founding as was liberty.

The passage of more than two centuries has not dulled government's appetite for power and taxes. It certainly has not dulled the appetites and ambitions of those who hold office — or who lobby them for favors, whether corporations and unions, nonprofit special interests or officials from other levels of government.

But the Founders' inherent distrust of government has been lost on too many Americans.

And the idea that government is a threat to liberty — the idea that there could be times when government becomes the problem — is often seen as near heresy, an idea radically out of step with American history.
We've become used to handouts and bailouts, a new agency to address every program. Government is widely viewed as akin to a wise, kindly and benevolent uncle, a rich one at that, who can distribute largesse and who we should call on to solve every kind of problem, eliminate risk, inconvenience and uncertainty in our lives.

This is not the path to secure liberty for ourselves and our posterity. And as liberty goes, so goes our dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.

We Americans will not lose our liberty because we call it by another name. But we can lose it if we do not aspire to it, if we seek comfort through government at every turn, if we forget government is always and everywhere a threat to liberty.

Government is not a kindly and wise guardian.

Mr. Paine captured the truth of the matter. Government is necessary, a necessary evil.

Tack Cornelius is a writer and Gainesville resident whose columns appear occasionally.