(Editor's note: The following is Andrew P. Napolitano's closing argument on his FreedomWatch Presidents Day special, which featured Tom DiLorenzo and Tom Woods. It is reproduced with Napolitano's permission.)

Does the government work on behalf of the people, or do the people exist for the benefit of government? Is history a recollection of things that have actually happened, or a narrative deployed to legitimize power and the crimes that led to the acquisition of that power?

In the last hour, we've heard that some of the presidents often billed by historians and the public as "the greatest" were anything but. To be fair, it's difficult to be a great person when your job is to head an organization such as the state that is rooted in deception, theft, and murder. And we know from Lord Acton that no great man is a good man.

From the beginning, any claim that the American government is good because some Americans are exceptional does not make any sense. The individual virtues of human beings cannot possibly extend to the government. By definition, the government lies, cheats, and steals. After all, it has no resources of its own, only those it appropriates from the people. No one may lawfully compete with it. We are forced to pay its bills and accept its so-called services. There is no escaping it. The ideas behind a nation may be exceptional, but they are not manifested by the government. And, of course, we must never mistake the government for the people it claims to represent.

"The minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo." - J. Edgar Hoover

The history of the FBI is the history of how America - once a nation that abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions - has steadily devolved into a police state where laws are unidirectional, intended as a tool for government to control the people and rarely the other way around.

The FBI was established in 1908 (as the Bureau of Investigation) by President Theodore Roosevelt and Attorney General Charles Bonaparte as a small task force assigned to deal with specific domestic crimes, its first being to survey houses of prostitution in anticipation of enforcing the White Slave Traffic Act. Initially quite limited in its abilities to investigate so-called domestic crimes, the FBI slowly expanded in size, scope, and authority over the course of the 20th Century.

"Of course, there is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country that allowed the police to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to hold people in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, then the government would no doubt discover and arrest more terrorists. But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live. And that would not be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to fight and die. In short, that would not be America." - Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), voicing his concerns over Congress' passage of the USA Patriot Act (October 25, 2001)

Russ Feingold, a staunch defender of the rule of law and the only senator to vote against the ominous USA Patriot Act, recently lost his bid for re-election to the U.S. Senate to a Tea Party-backed Republican. From the start, Feingold warned that the massive 342-page piece of legislation would open the door to graver dangers than terrorism - namely, America becoming a police state. He was right.

The Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, violating at least six of the ten original amendments - the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments - and possibly the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well. The Patriot Act also redefined terrorism so broadly that many non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations and civil disobedience were considered potential terrorist acts, thereby rendering anyone desiring to engage in protected First Amendment expressive activities as suspects of the surveillance state.

The Patriot Act justified broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens - no doubt an earnest impulse shared by small-town police and federal agents alike. According to Washington Post reporter Robert O'Harrow, Jr., this was a fantasy that had "been brewing in the law enforcement world for a long time." And 9/11 provided the government with the perfect excuse for conducting far-reaching surveillance and collecting mountains of information on even the most law-abiding citizen.

(Editor's note: This is a response to the guest commentary "Attack Tyranny at Its Weakest Link: Enforcement.")

In his 1849 essay "Civil Disobedience," Henry David Thoreau seemed disinterested in the systemic mechanisms available to battle injustice. "They take too much time, and a man's life will be gone," he wrote. "I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad."

Thoreau's hatred of government was no secret. In the opening paragraph of that essay, he made this blanket statement: "That government is best which governs not at all."

Those sentiments are clearly the roots of "Attack Tyranny at Its Weakest Link - Enforcement," by Kevin Carson of the Center for a Stateless Society. The piece can be summarized by its conclusion: "Don't waste time trying to change the law. Just disobey it."

Within that guest commentary, there are trenchant observations, especially the argument that the current United States political system makes grassroots legislative reform difficult if not impossible. (This frustration with democratic niceties is hardly new; as Thoreau wrote: "Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.")

Carson argues that in that context, it is far more efficient to simply disobey the law than to try to reform it: "Public agitation against a law may be very fruitful indeed - but not so much by creating pressure to change the law as by creating a climate of public opinion such that it becomes a dead letter."

The article obviously comes from an anarchist perspective, and it's true to the anti-state nature of that philosophy. But the commentary's arguments are problematic for those who believe in the necessity of the state - even those who distrust or hate government but see a role for it, no matter how limited. And Carson ignores the moral elements of Thoreau's essay, which specifically advocates disobedience of laws that would compel one to act unjustly toward others. Carson's piece is either woefully incomplete or shockingly immature.