100% Wrong

While there is much to agree with in this post by Douglas Young (Samizdata.net, America: closing her door to freedom, June 8, 2009), the sentence (below) is so wrong, so historically daft, that it reduces the credibility of his earlier points to dust:

Never forget that we are the heirs of the most libertarian, God-fearing revolutionaries in history.

The Founding Fathers were not even remotely libertarian.  They were Republican (uppercase R).  They believed that the People have complete control and power to form a government of their choosing, regardless of what it looked like, or how outwardly tyrannical it may be or appear.  They gave us the structure in which to do whatever we wanted, and to limit or grant the government the ability to do anything we desire it to do.  While the Founders hoped that the people would make laws with a "wholesome descretion," it was a hope not a requirement or limitation on the people's authority.

"The catholic principle of republicanism [is] that every people may establish what form of government they please and change it as they please, the will of the nation being the only thing essential."

- Thomas Jeffersons, 1792

"What government [a nation] can bear depends not on the state of science, however exalted, in a select band of enlightened men, but on the condition of the general mind."

- Thomas Jefferson, 1817

The right of "self-government of and by the people" has nothing to do with the notions of libertarianism.  If people think that, or believe that, they have missed entirely what the Founders gave us and others fought and died for.  People may disagree with the direction the nation has taken, or the policies and schemes that we live under, but to assert that the people have no right to do what they have done (or will do) reveals themselves as tyrants in disguise, however englightened they may think themselves.

"The first principle of republicanism is that the lex majoris partis is the fundamental law of every society of individuals of equal rights; to consider the will of the society enounced by the majority of a single vote as sacred as if unanimous is the first of all lessons in importance, yet the last which is thoroughly learnt. This law once disregarded, no other remains but that of force, which ends necessarily in military despotism."

- Thomas Jefferson, 1817