Meanwhile, the moral foundation of freedom was eroded by the pragmatic compromises that accompanied the first implementations of liberal ideas. The original U. S. Constitution, as we have noted, explicitly sanctioned slavery as well as a number of lesser forms of intervention. As historian Gabriel Kolko points out in The Triumph of Conservatism (cf. p. 4.11:139, including last "Reference" box), interventionism in the early days of the nation created a privileged class of powerful men, who would later seek additional regulatory measures to preserve and consolidate that power. As we shall show later, such compromises tend to put into motion a process of increasing statism, which eventually acquires an almost irresistible momentum of its own.
These compromises in turn reflect the ethical orientation of early classical liberals, who were never quite philosophically comfortable with the morality of rational self-interest and who frequently tried to justify their positions on altruistic grounds. The Constitution, according to its preamble, was instituted to "promote the general Welfare"—a phrase which, although vague and undefined, connotes some kind of collective "social good." Many later English liberals appealed to an explicitly altruistic ethic, such as the social utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. In contrast, the proper philosophical foundation for freedom and liberalism, as we have seen, is provided by the ethics of rational egoism and the metaphysical principle that each individual is an end in himself or herself.

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