Seeking government coddling. Do Americans still value - our freedom? Do we still hold the Posted: Oct 16th, 2018 - 3:11 am
values of the Declaration of Independence, the vision that founded this country?
A piece last week by Stephen Dinan in this newspaper revealed that most Americans today could not pass the citizenship test. King George III would be so proud. He and his aristocratic friends laughed at America’s quaint “experiment” with self-government.
To them, it was unthinkable that common people were enlightened enough to rule themselves. That experiment is now the hope and dream of people throughout the world, but what about here in the United States?
Astonishingly, today’s Americans expect government to care for us from cradle to grave, the way commoners once expected a benevolent king to care for his subjects. We treat people as members of groups rather than as individuals, insidiously devolving into the very class system against which the Founders rebelled.
In a deeply disturbing sense, Americans are voluntarily surrendering the very freedoms that millions fought and died to establish and protect. President James Garfield once said the most common form of death in politics is suicide. After a noble 225-year history, is the American experiment dying at the hands of its own people?
Many of the “long train of abuses” that led to our rebellion from the British crown are eerily similar to our own government’s excesses. The Declaration of Independence listed grievances against the king that are all too familiar today. The authors accused the king of refusing “his assent to laws necessary for the public good,” of forbidding locals to pass laws “of immediate and pressing importance,” even of dissolving local representative bodies.
How different is that from today’s “supreme” federal system that routinely over-rides local and state laws, especially by federal court orders and “constitutional” rulings based on premises not in the U.S. Constitution?
The crown had “obstructed the administration of justice” by controlling judges’ tenure and salaries; today’s government does so by empowering judges to usurp legislative powers — to make up new laws rather than interpret laws passed by the people’s representatives. It is a more modern technique, but with the same anti-democratic result.
King George had “erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” In 2018, the federal government has more than 4 million employees and costs taxpayers more than $4 trillion a year. The king “combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution,” much as modern leaders compromise our sovereignty to institutions like the United Nations, international courts and foreign trade commissions.
The Founders said government should protect private property, but today’s U.S. Supreme Court lets government take private property and sell to developers, take away the value of land by denying the right to use it, and force landowners to give their land for endangered species habitat, parks, trails and “open space.”
The first “inalienable right” in our Declaration of Independence was the right to life, but today’s courts prohibit states from protecting it. If we still believe “all men are created equal,” how can we justify racial preferences in school admission, government contracts and congressional reapportionment? Freedom of speech is central to the Bill of Rights, but it is under attack by politically correct thought police at government-funded universities all across the nation.
“The policy of the federal government,” wrote President Jefferson, “is to leave her citizens free — neither aiding nor restraining them in their pursuits.” Today, we are not allowed to plan our own retirement, design our own health insurance, or even devise our own children’s education.
The endless intrusion reaches every facet of our lives from where we can hike in the woods to how our hamburgers must be cooked. Both political parties instinctively look to government as the first answer to all problems. Even Republicans propose solving issues like illegal immigration by hiring thousands more federal employees.
There is one crucial difference: Unlike our colonial ancestors, contemporary Americans voluntarily agreed to all these usurpations with their votes. We have been warned frequently to be alert. In 1835 Tocqueville wrote, “the American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” Sadly, that day has long since arrived.
Americans have two clear choices. Do we really want to declare the America of our Founders dead and accept a mediocre socialism it has devolved into? Or do we want to withdraw the “consent of the governed” and revive the American experiment that made us the freest people on Earth and the envy of the world?”
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