Calvin Massey, Gentleman Farmer

[Excerpt] “So much of Calvin’s work was intelligible as work about freedom and independence, preventing aggregations of government power that threatened individual freedom. Calvin didn’t love federalism because he had a romanticized view of statehood, he believed in it because he thought centralized power in the federal government was a bigger threat to individual freedom than states were. In most states, a tin-pot governor and amateur hour legislators just aren’t going to be as effective at coercing beliefs as an Executive Branch that contains the U.S. Treasury, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the CIA, not to mention the Pentagon and the Department of Education to tell us all how to teach our classes. Some colleagues thought that Calvin was a libertarian, and I honestly can’t remember whether he embraced that label or not, but he sure as hell didn’t want the government telling people what to think or how to behave in their private lives.”