This is how Liberty died
Published Fri, Aug 6 2010 4:19 PM
Not with a bang, but piece by piece.
If you have been a reader of this blog in the past, you know that I am in love with the Country that our founding fathers established and left to us. I wish I could still say that I was in love with the United States, but I have come to the conclusion that this is not the country that our founding fathers gave us. Instead our Liberty is under assault from the political “elites”, judges, and bureaucrats running us from the federal government.
Democrats and Liberals are fond of telling us that we are living in a Democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have NEVER lived in a Democracy, not even since the days of the founders. The founders left us with a representative republic – but we have not kept it.
Recall if you will a bit of history – in the late 18th century there were many European colonies here on this continent. The “new world” was seen as a source of wealth in Europe – hence the incentive for colonization. European conflicts that had simmered for ages spilled over to the colonies – resulting in the occasional war and the exploitation of the native populations as combatants against colonies on behalf of European powers. These conflicts were not cheap – Britain spent huge sums to protect her colonies from the French and their “Indian” allies. Already exploiting the resources of the colonies and over-extended by fighting in a conflict across the ocean Britain decided that it needed more and more money from the colonies – in the form of taxes.
Read the Declaration of Independence. Thirteen united colonies had finally had enough by 1776 (in fact armed conflict had broken out even before that) and unanimously declared themselves to be thirteen independent nations equal to all other sovereign nations throughout the world. They did this in protest of an overreaching monarchy and a central government far removed from local concerns. The British government and its agents had suppressed personal liberties, seized personal property, suppressed and invalidated the actions of local governments and the like. Revolution was the result.
These thirteen independent nations quickly banded together to form a confederacy under the belief that if they didn’t hold together they would be unable to defend themselves against other nations. The confederacy had little power other than to ask these nations to support it. The “States” or nations were sovereign – holding the powers of all nations and governing their people according to the will of those people.
The big problem with the confederacy was it’s general weakness. No state could by compelled to defend another. No state was required to permit free commerce between its people and the people of another state. The national debt was huge (for its time) and the confederacy couldn’t raise the money to cover it, because the states couldn’t be compelled to share their revenues with it. The Constitutional Convention was held to fix these problems with the Articles of Confederation. But, in a result that should stand as a warning to those advocates of a new Constitutional Convention to address what people see as deficiencies in our current Constitution, rather than merely “fixing” the Articles of Confederation the convention instead established a new form of Government in the U.S. Constitution.
A plain reading of the words of the Constitution, as well as a basic understanding of the debates and arguments that took place during the convention and the words of the founders both in the Federalist and the Anti-Federalist papers will make it clear that the founders intended for the federal government to be somewhat stronger than the confederacy but still limited in its powers. The federal government was given very specific explicit powers and obligations. The Bill of Rights established more clearly limitations upon the federal government. The ninth and tenth amendments in particular made it clear that the people had rights that were not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, and that the people and the States were left with any power that was not explicitly forbidden to them by the Constitution.
I think it would be nice to live in that country. The States were for the most part the sole governors of the people. The federal government was to protect and defend the States from foreign enemies – and from each other.
But we don’t live in that country anymore. In fact it seems that for my entire life we haven’t lived in that country. Before I was even born the courts had decided that the federal government could tell a farmer how much of what type of crops he could grow on his own land. While I was a teenager the federal government decided that it could regulate what drugs a person could use as medicine or for “recreational purposes'” without regard for the fact that it had no constitutional authority to do so. Some decades previous to this it took a constitutional amendment to ban the sale, possession or consumption of alcohol in the country – but now by bureaucratic fiat the Constitution no longer mattered.
The trend just continues. The current administration and Congress has no respect for the voice of the people. They laugh at questions of constitutional authority. Some assert that the federal government can do whatever it wants. A single federal judge can call 7 million Californians bigots unqualified to cast a ballot and overturns the California constitution. The government seizes private property – nationalizing the automotive business for one. It dictates how much a private individual can receive in compensation for his services to a company via the whim of an unelected bureaucrat. It demands billions of dollars from a foreign company to compensate victims of its (the governments) misguided policies and tardiness in dealing with an accident. It selectively enforces its own laws and ignores its constitutionally mandated duties to the states – while suing those very states for defending themselves. When nearly three quarters of the voters in a state vote against its unconstitutional mandate that individuals purchase a product that they don’t want or face a federally imposed fine its representatives dismiss that vote as “meaningless”.
The federal government under liberalism has grown into a monster. It bears NO resemblance to the government that our founding fathers created and left to us. We are now slaves to the whim of the “elite” in government.
We don’t even have the option that our founders had. The most recent nominee to the supreme court of the United States doesn’t think that the Declaration of Independence has any meaning. And armed revolt is doomed. The left has worked diligently to take away the one remaining protection that the people have against tyranny. We cannot arm ourselves in any way that would be effective in protecting ourselves from the military might that is under the command of today’s crop of socialists and statists.
Once this was a free nation. I lament that it no longer is, and that it may never be again. I wish I could see things in a better light. I wish that November would bring a real change. But I think it’s long past the time when even the TEA party activists can do anything effective to return our Liberties to us. The majority of people in this country don’t like the way it’s being run from Washington now. And Washington doesn’t seem to care – or even fear the wrath of the people.
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T.F. Stern responded with:
 | You might say that what has been done is a sin before God since He had high hopes for it, defended it, held it up for the world to see as a banner. Now look at it, hardly indistinguishable from the rest of the world. |
Bill Walker responded with:
 | The author fails to mention the states have already applied in sufficient number to cause an Article V Convention. Nor is it mentioned that the Constitution clearly states a convention can only propose amendments to the present Constitution. You can read the applications at www.foavc.org. There are other misstatements regarding the original convention. These are addressed at http://www.nolanchart.com/article6449.html |
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