I was delighted to get a large number of enthusiastic e-mails on the column — confirmation of my longstanding belief that if more people knew what the Constitution actually says, they'd be eager to reclaim the heritage the Founders left us. But of course, readers wanted to know if we could accomplish that goal, and how we’d go about it.

Let's acknowledge up front that it won't be easy. The biggest reason is that so many Americans have gotten hooked on government programs the Constitution doesn't authorize that dismantling those programs, even gradually over time, might look politically impractical. But demographics — the aging of baby-boomers combined with the low birthrate since then — make it inevitable that middle-class programs like Social Security and Medicare will be gone, or a shadow of what they are now, within 30 years or so. That's common knowledge among younger Americans (I don't know anyone under 40 who expects to get Social Security), and it's only a matter of time until political leaders rise up who will call for an alternative, private-sector approach to retirement — a shift we must make while there's still time to phase it in.

This will happen whether people understand the Constitution or not. But it provides an opening to make people realize how we got into this mess — how removing the Founders' strict limits on government led to unchecked growth in the welfare state, until it crumbled of its own weight. This is what we get in democracies once politicians begin practicing what French author Frederic Bastiat, in his classic 1850 book The Law, called "legal plunder," forcibly taking some people's earnings to buy the votes of others. Liberals have the gall to call this "compassion," as if compassion could be extracted under threat from the IRS. In truth, however, it’s simply corruption. It’s not an exaggeration to say that big government has corrupted a nation.

Happily, we have an alternative we can tell the world about, and it's anything but new and untried. We need to keep government as small and local as possible, for reasons both practical and moral.

The practical reason is to guard against abuse of power. As I mentioned in my last column, it's hard to sustain big government on the state level when people can choose from 50 different states to live in, some of which will have drastically lower tax rates. Once Americans have the option of voting with their feet, their liberties will be far more secure than they can ever be relying on federal courts or civil-rights agencies.

But we shouldn’t overlook the moral reasons for keeping things close to home either. They have to do not only with the right to self-government but with the responsibility of taking care of our neighbors.

One thoughtful e-mail I got raised the question of what would happen to those people who, through no fault of their own, really need help to get by. The writer (Emily) felt that this is the job of the church — not necessarily the institutional church, but Christians in general. "I believe that if Christians were to start taking action by providing for those in need ... these programs such as welfare that conservatives so vehemently protest would no longer be needed," she wrote. Moreover, "if Christians shared with the poor and ministered to them the way God has called us to, imagine how many people would witness God's love truly in action!"

Emily is right. The welfare state has many obvious evils — it takes our money by force, and it fosters laziness and family breakdown on the part of recipients. But one of the less obvious evils is that it encourages a "checkbook charity" mentality in the rest of us: "I've paid my taxes, so I've done my bit." That’s a far cry from the spirit of the good Samaritan; it’s more like that of the Pharisee who pats himself on the back thinking he’s already attained God’s standard of righteousness.

There's no doubt that we can support the truly needy, especially with the far lower tax rates that a small-scale, local-government America would have. It would cost far less than our current welfare spending, the majority of which goes to the not-so-needy, the shiftless and the bureaucracy. It's just a matter of adjusting our attitudes, to treat our neighbors like neighbors.

This is what a movement to get back to the Constitution would be about — not just breaking up the monstrosity centered in Washington, D.C., but restoring authentic community and self-government to our country.

If we achieve it, it'll happen because we're spreading ideas that are true, giving people a vision of what this country was meant to be like. Most of us will do it by talking to our friends, sending out e-mails, posting to newsgroups, writing letters to the editor. Some of us will do it in specialized ways — as professional writers, say, or political leaders. And eventually, if enough of us keep at it, we'll make our way into the public consciousness.

Will we win over the country? That I can't say; I'm not a political strategist, much less a prophet. What I can say is that nearly all good ideas that ever came to fruition started out small, sneered at by worldly-wise people certain that such things could never come to fruition. If you know your history, you'll know that the United States of America started just that way. God gave it to this nation once to become a constitutional republic, against all the world's odds. If it's His will, it can happen again.

Read All About It: If you want to get up to speed on constitutional history quickly, check out an excellent piece by essayist Joseph Sobran, which covers not only the system the Founders designed but how we lost it. If you want to go further, look for books like prominent historian Forrest McDonald’s A Constitutional History of the United States. And of course, you can delve into founding documents like the Constitution itself, the Federalist Papers written to defend it, and the Anti-Federalist Papers expressing concerns which the Constitution’s authors had to address.