In a limited government, the power of government to intervene in the exercise of civil liberties is restricted by law, usually in a written constitution. It is a principle of classical liberalism, free market libertarianism, and some tendencies of liberalism and conservatism in the United States. The theory of limited government contrasts, for example, with the ideal that government should intervene to promote equality and opportunity through regulation of property and wealth redistribution.
In the United States, as discussed in the Federalist Papers, the idea of limited government originally implied the notion of a separation of powers and the system of checks and balances promoted by the U.S. Constitution. This understanding of limited government maintains that government is internally limited by the system of checks and balances as well as the Constitution itself, which can be amended, and externally through the republican principle of electoral accountability. Such an understanding of limited government, as explained by James Madison, does not place arbitrary and ideologically biased parameters on the actions of a government thus allowing government to change as time demands.
"Limited government" stands in contrast to the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. Under that doctrine, the king, and by extension his entire government, held unlimited sovereignty over its subjects. Limited government exists where some effective limits restrict governmental power. In Western civilization, the Magna Carta stands as the early exemplar of a document limiting the reach of the king's sovereignty. While its limits protected only a small portion of the English population, it did state that the king's barons possessed rights which they could assert against the king. The English Bill of Rights associated with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 established limits of royal sovereignty. In contrast, and as stated in the above paragraph, The United States Constitution of 1787 created a government limited by the terms of the written document itself, by the election by the people of the legislators and the executive, and by the checks and balances through which the three branches of government limited each other's power.
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Famous quotes containing the words limited and/or government:
“There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience....”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“There exists in a great part of the Northern people a gloomy diffidence in the moral character of the government. On the broaching of this question, as general expression of despondency, of disbelief that any good will accrue from a remonstrance on an act of fraud and robbery, appeared in those men to whom we naturally turn for aid and counsel. Will the American government steal? Will it lie? Will it kill?—We ask triumphantly.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)