This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 24th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The United States is exceptional, but it doesn't have to stay that way.

At Cato University this summer, Rob McDonald,

a professor of history at West Point,

talked about the long history of American thinking

on rights and individual liberty and the compromise that became the United States.

I want to begin by talking about some of the foundations for American liberty,

some of the ideas, some of the notions,

some of the conditions that made the soil

of the United States perhaps especially fertile and conducive to a self-governing people.

And by self-governing I mean not only did we collectively self-govern ourselves

without interference from Great Britain.

But to a really large extent, for at least people who were free,

we were able to govern ourselves as individuals. So this is in many respects a very free place and the

government that emerges from the American Revolution is a very free government and you know leads to a very free nation. But then we could see before

the ink is even really dry on the Constitution. People beginning to make decisions that would cause government to grow.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that the traditional order of things is for liberty to yield and for government to gain ground.

At least in Jefferson's eyes, liberty and government were opposites, right?

And the more you had of one, the less you had of the other and the story of our

history is in in in many respects a story of the growth of government so so that's

where I'm heading.

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