President Donald Trump argued recently that as a result of the federal enhancement of police work in Washington, D.C., the city has gone in four days from being the most dangerous in America to being the safest. He cited no evidence but relied apparently on his own observations and anecdotal references from friends. He opined that everyone wants him to keep their cities and towns safe.

Trump couldn’t resist taking credit for an increase in the number of arrests. These included such crimes as vagrancy, running away from federal agents, and striking the bulletproof vest of a federal agent with a sandwich. It remains to be seen if arrests for quality-of-life crimes or non-crimes (vagrancy laws are unconstitutional, and running from federal agents is not a crime unless they have a lawful purpose to pursue you) can be translated into convictions and palpable safety.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison understood that everyone wants to be safe, but they recognized that some prices are too high to pay for safety. Those prices include the loss of personal liberty, an expansion of already bloated presidential powers, the loss of local control of police and the violation of the constitutional principle of subsidiarity.

One of Jefferson’s bitterest complaints in the Declaration of Independence was the king’s repeated violations of the doctrine of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity was crafted by the Romans, gained popularity after it was codified by St. Thomas Aquinas and generally adopted in the West.

Subsidiarity teaches that when the government seeks to accomplish a task — be it the prosecution of a jaywalker or waging war against another country — because it is using force and assets given to it by the governed (no government produces wealth, thus everything government possesses it has taken), government must use the least force and fewest assets necessary, and this can only be done efficiently by the government closest to the problem at hand.

Madison understood this when he crafted the Constitution. In it, he delineated precisely the powers of the new central government. Public safety — as desirable as that may be — is not among them. He also sought to compel subsidiarity. Thus, by omitting health, safety, welfare and morality as areas of governance delegated to the federal government, he reserved those areas to the states. And he crafted the 10th Amendment to codify those reservations.

I have often argued that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are unconstitutional. They are not articulated or even hinted at in the Constitution, and their tasks — public safety — are reserved to the states. Until the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the feds never cared to be involved in crime fighting. These were state concerns, and their needs were vastly different throughout the country.

Then Wilson crafted the precursor to the FBI and persuaded Congress that since we now had a federal police force, they needed federal crimes to enforce.

While the District of Columbia is actually owned by Congress, which gave the president his 32-day window to commandeer D.C. police to assist federal functions, since public safety is not a federal function, Trump’s efforts to clean up the streets and arrest the folks he says are thugs and brawlers are without a constitutional basis.

Human freedom comes about by limiting government, not expanding it. And freedom prospers when established processes are followed. If the government can do as it wishes in the name of public safety, who will protect us from the government?