Estimated Time to Read: 2 minutes
Liberty precedes government; its role is to secure it, not to grant it. Yet in Texas, government increasingly behaves as though its role is not to govern within limits, but to manage every outcome. This is precisely the danger Texas Policy Research (TPR) continues to warn against, beginning with the most foundational principle of all: limited government.
Limited government does not mean weak government. It means a government confined to its proper role of protecting life, liberty, and property, while leaving free people free to live, work, and innovate. When government exceeds that job description, liberty erodes not through dramatic tyranny, but through steady accumulation.
Texas provides no shortage of examples. Agencies routinely promulgate rules that carry the force of law despite never being voted on by the Legislature. Compliance regimes multiply even where statutes are silent or vague. Businesses and individuals find themselves bound not by laws passed by elected representatives, but by interpretations issued by bureaucrats insulated from voters.
TPR often notes that concentrated, unelected power inevitably expands. James Madison made the same observation centuries earlier: “The accumulation of all powers…in the same hands…may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Federalist 47 Though modern bureaucracy doesn’t look like the king’s court, the principle remains unchanged. Authority untethered from accountability grows.
Classical liberals understood this danger well. In The Law, Bastiat warned that when government moves beyond protecting rights and begins redistributing or regulating behavior, the law perverts itself. Hayek later explained how administrative control replaces the rule of law with the rule of discretion, where outcomes depend not on clear rules, but on who holds power.
Conservatives have long echoed the warning. Ronald Reagan famously observed that government solutions to problems often become the problem, not because intentions are bad, but because incentives are misaligned. Agencies are rewarded for expansion, not restraint. Legislators pass broad laws, then distance themselves from how those laws are enforced.
The result is a government that no longer asks, “Is this our job?” but instead asks, “Why shouldn’t we do this too?”
Texas was built on a different understanding. Texans traditionally knew liberty would not survive vague authority. The Legislature is meant to legislate. Agencies are meant to execute policy, not to write it.
Restoring limited government does not require new laws. It requires enforcing the principles upon which Texas and the United States were founded. If the government stays within its job description, Texans can remain free. If it doesn’t, freedom quietly gives way to permission, and permission, by definition, is not liberty.
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