The Common Good Is Not a Blank Check for Government Power

There is a growing debate on the American Right about liberty, government power, and what conservatives mean when they speak of the “common good.”

A recent Washington Examiner article brought that disagreement into unusually clear focus. Its argument is that the Founders did not regard maximum individual autonomy as the highest political good. Instead, they understood republican government as dependent upon virtue, strong families, social order, religion, and institutions capable of sustaining a free people.

There is a great deal of truth in that.

The Founders did not understand liberty to mean freedom from every restraint. James Madison wrote about rulers possessing the wisdom and virtue necessary to pursue the common good of society. John Adams wrote that government exists for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people.

They also understood something that modern politics often forgets: liberty does not sustain itself automatically. A free society depends upon habits, institutions, families, churches, communities, and civic virtue that government did not create and cannot easily replace.

But acknowledging that truth does not resolve the harder question. It raises it.

What Is the Common Good, and Who Gets to Decide?

That is the question that should sit at the center of this debate.

Every political faction believes, at some level, that its preferred policies advance the common good.

Progressives (Regressives) may believe redistribution advances the common good. Nationalists may believe protectionism does. Social conservatives may believe restrictions on vice do. Environmentalists may believe sweeping economic regulations do. Technocrats may believe greater administrative control does.

The phrase itself does very little to constrain government. That IS the problem.

A principle broad enough to justify nearly anything can eventually be used to justify almost everything.

What strengthens society? What corrodes it? What behavior creates sufficient social harm to justify coercion? When does government protection become government paternalism?

Those questions cannot be answered merely by invoking the common good. They REQUIRE limiting principles.

Liberty First Does Not Mean Virtue Does Not Matter

Some will hear a defense of liberty and assume it means moral neutrality. It does NOT. Liberty requires responsibility.

A free people cannot remain free indefinitely if families collapse, civic institutions decay, addiction spreads, personal responsibility disappears, or communities lose the ability to form moral norms.

The Washington Examiner article is right to challenge the idea that every voluntary adult choice should be treated as politically irrelevant simply because no immediate victim can be identified. It argues that social harms can accumulate gradually across millions of individual decisions and weaken the institutions upon which liberty itself depends.

That is a serious argument. But recognizing that a behavior is destructive does not automatically establish that government should suppress it.

That is the distinction I believe matters most.

Virtue Must Grow From the Bottom Up

Individuals, families, churches, voluntary associations, and communities are generally better positioned to pursue human flourishing than politicians or bureaucrats.

That is not because those institutions are perfect. It is because they are closer to the individual, more responsive to particular circumstances, and less dependent upon coercive power.

Families form character.

Churches teach moral obligations.

Communities establish norms.

Voluntary associations cultivate responsibility.

Markets coordinate behavior without centralized direction.

Individuals make choices and bear consequences.

That is where much of the moral infrastructure of a free society actually comes from. Even Christianity illustrates the distinction in a particularly powerful way. Faith is not produced through top-down government coercion. Government may regulate conduct, but it cannot manufacture conviction.

It can prohibit. It can punish. It can tax. It can subsidize. It can incentivize. But it cannot create genuine virtue in the human heart.

That work takes place from the bottom up.

Government Should Protect the Space Where Virtue Can Flourish

This does not mean government has no legitimate role.

Government should preserve public order, enforce contracts, protect property, punish genuine violations of rights, and maintain a legal framework in which civil society can function. But its first responsibility is to secure natural rights and preserve ordered liberty, not to become the primary architect of human virtue.

That matters because once government is given broad authority to define human flourishing, it also acquires broad authority to tell people what to value, what to believe, and ultimately what they should become.

That is where the language of the common good becomes dangerous. The issue is not whether there is such a thing as the common good. Of course there is.

It is whether government should have open-ended authority to define it.

The Founders Believed in Virtue and Distrusted Power

The Founders believed virtue mattered. They also deeply distrusted concentrated political power. Those ideas were not contradictory. They were complementary.

The Constitution divides power among branches. It divides authority between the federal government and the states. It enumerates federal powers. It protects individual rights. It establishes procedural barriers that intentionally make government action more difficult.

Those restraints exist for a reason. People who sincerely believe they are pursuing the public good are still capable of abusing power.

That is one reason the article’s historical argument should be handled carefully. It notes, correctly, that governments in the early republic regulated gambling, alcohol, obscenity, prostitution, Sunday commerce, and marriage.

But the Founders did not create a single undifferentiated governmental authority with a general mandate to promote virtue.

Federalism mattered. Enumerated powers mattered. State police powers mattered. Constitutional structure mattered.

The question was not merely whether an activity was harmful. It was also which level of government, if any, possessed legitimate authority to address it.

Ordered Liberty Is the Missing Alternative

Too often this debate is framed as a choice between two camps.

On one side is maximum individual autonomy. Adults should generally be free to do whatever they wish so long as they do not directly harm another person.

On the other is a more substantive vision of the common good, in which government may intervene to strengthen families, promote social cohesion, discourage vice, or shape society toward preferred ends.

I do not think those are our only choices.

There is another tradition worth defending: ordered liberty.

Ordered liberty recognizes that freedom is not license. It accepts that culture matters, morality matters, families matter, civic institutions matter, and social order matters. But it also recognizes that government itself is capable of becoming a threat to all of those things.

That is why constitutional limits are not obstacles standing in the way of the common good. They are part of the common good. Free speech is part of the common good. Property rights are part of the common good. Federalism is part of the common good. Due process is part of the common good. Religious liberty is part of the common good. The separation of powers is part of the common good. And a government restrained from acting merely because a temporary political majority believes it knows what is best for everyone else is part of the common good too.

Conservatism Is Changing

This debate also reflects a broader transformation within the American Right. For decades, much of the conservative movement drew from a fusion of traditional conservatism and classical liberalism.

That tradition emphasized constitutional government, individual liberty, free enterprise, federalism, private property, personal responsibility, and a deep skepticism of centralized political power.

Today, a growing populist tendency within the Republican coalition is more comfortable using government affirmatively to shape economic, cultural, and social outcomes.

That may take the form of industrial policy, economic protectionism, restrictions on disfavored industries, attempts to regulate cultural behavior, or broader efforts to use public power to produce preferred social outcomes.

Some of the problems being identified are real. That does not mean every proposed government response is justified.

Conservatives should be especially cautious about abandoning skepticism of government simply because they believe their side is finally in a position to wield it.

Political power changes hands. Precedents remain.

Would You Give the Same Power to Your Opponents?

There is one test I find increasingly useful when evaluating proposals justified by the common good.

Would you be comfortable giving the exact same authority to your political opponents?

If the answer is no, that should tell us something.

Would we want a progressive administration deciding which forms of speech undermine social cohesion?

Would we want environmental activists deciding which industries sufficiently threaten the common good to justify shutting them down?

Would we want officials hostile to religious liberty deciding which beliefs threaten public welfare?

Would we want bureaucrats deciding what constitutes dangerous misinformation, extremism, or socially harmful conduct?

If we would not trust those powers in their hands, we should be cautious about creating those powers when our own political allies are temporarily in charge.

That is not political cowardice. It IS constitutional prudence.

The Choice Is Not Liberty or Virtue

The most important disagreement here may ultimately come down to a false choice.

We do not have to choose between a society without virtue and a government empowered to impose it.

A free society depends upon virtue, responsibility, family, faith, community, and civic institutions. But those things are strongest when they grow from the bottom up.

Government’s role is to protect the liberty that allows them to flourish, not to replace them. That is why I am hesitant to say the “common good” comes before liberty.

A better way to understand the Founding tradition is that ordered liberty itself is part of the common good. The Founders did not believe in unlimited individual autonomy. But neither did they create a government with unlimited authority to determine what human flourishing should look like.

They understood human nature well enough to know that rulers are no less susceptible to ambition, error, self-interest, and vice than the people they govern.

That insight remains ESSENTIAL today.

A healthy conservatism should be capable of saying two things at once. A free society requires virtue, and government power requires limits.

Those principles do not undermine each other. They sustain each other. The common good matters, but it cannot become a blank check for government power. Because liberty, constitutional restraint, strong families, vibrant communities, and a thriving civil society are not competing visions of the common good.

They are among its essential foundations.