The Importance of Lesser Magistrates

Government is dangerous. We know this in principle because it is human government. The people whom God sets over us are generally no better than us, and frequently worse. In fact, at times, it looks like an extremely clever jailbreak. But though dangerous, government is also necessary. When we see the police pull back from their difficult work of securing public safety, the proof of this need is dramatic, swift, and tragic. We are left asking, then, as James Madison asked in Federalist Papers No. 51, how to "enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself." In the past eighteen months of the Covid pandemic crisis, there has been a great deal of attention on how to control the governed -- keep them inside, keep them separated, keep them masked, get them vaccinated -- but relatively little on restraining the inevitable abuse or ill-advised use of that control.