Today, we are in an ideological struggle right now over the proper role and scope of government. We are not only witnessing a Constitutional crisis in this country, but a crisis based on a failure to appreciate what liberty means and stands for. We saw the beginning of this struggle in 1964 with the Lyndon Johnson's "New Society." Campaigning for Barry Goldwater in 1964 to replace the socialist Johnson, Ronald Reagan delivered these words:
The notion of 'the full power of centralized government' was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy. Private property rights are so diluted that public interest is almost anything a few government planners decide it should be.... Now it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed to the--or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? And such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment. This is the issue.. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves......... You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
What do you believe is the proper role of government? How strongly do you value liberty? Do you even know how freedom is protected and what it is even worth anymore?
The Constitution is not a complicated document. Along with the Declaration of Independence, it is our great guarantor of liberty. It lists the responsibilities of government (only 17 of them, mostly having nothing to do with our everyday lives) and then lists those individual human rights and liberties that it must not legislate and burden. Everything else is left to the individual and to the States. The States, being closest to the individual, are the sovereigns that are most responsive to the people and therefore best able to protect their interests. The Constitution was never supposed to encroach upon the supreme rights of the States in protecting the individual. As James Madison explained: "Every word of the Constitution decides a question between power and liberty."
Maybe you are one of those citizens who enjoyed the American dream at one time but don't have the energy to fight for it for your children or grandchildren. Maybe you are apathetic and have given into the system that has taken hold. Well then, my friend, you have just acknowledged that your government has become oppressive.
If you love this country - if you love it for its freedom and its opportunity and NOT for what it gives you in material aid - then you know things can't continue to go the way they are going. Something has to change. And it has to start with us. It falls upon all of us to take action. As Ronald Reagan once asked: "We have to ask ourselves if we do nothing, where does all of this end. Can anyone here say that if we can't do it, someone down the road can do it, and if no one does it, what happens to the country? All of us know the economy would face an eventual collapse. I know it's a hell of a challenge, but ask yourselves if not us, who, if not now, when?"
As one-time Yale Law school dean Robert Hutchins predicted, the death of the republic will not come from something like an assassination or an attack or even an election, but rather from apathy and indifference.
If you believe in large government, in a government that does more for you than you wish to do for yourself, and if you are willing to allow government to keep eroding and encroaching on the liberties that our country was founded on, then one day you will have to look a patriot and soldier in the eye and justify why you were so cavalier with the freedom that he so willingly gave his last full measure of devotion.
References:
Limited Government, http://principlesofafreesociety.com/limited-government/
Walter Williams, "Visions of Morality, Dec. 7, 2011, The Daily Reflector (Greenville, NC)
Thomas Kidd, Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots, 2011, Basic Books.
Cleon Skousen, The 5000-Year Leap, National Center for Constitutional Studies, 2009. (originally published in 1981).
Leonard Carmichael, Absolutes, Relativism and the Scientific Psychology of Human Nature, 1961, Van Nostrand, pg. 9
A. Kenneth Hesselberg, "Hume, Natural Law and Justice," Duquesne Review, Spring 1961, pp. 46-47.
Edwin W. Patterson, Jurisprudence: Men and Ideas of the Law, 1953, Foundation Press (Brooklyn, NY), pg. 333.
Diane Rufino, Secession: Does a State Have the Right to Secede?, August 2011, http://forloveofgodandcountry.wordpress.com
R. Carter Pittman, "Which Shall It Be? Liberty or Equality, Americanism or Marxism," Address delivered at the Annual Convention of the Alabama Bar Association, Alabama, July 16, 1954. Referenced at: http://www.jtl.org/pittman/ and http://rcarterpittman.org/essays/misc/Which_Shall_It_Be.html
Diane Rufino has her own blog For Love of God and Country. Come and visit her. She'd love your company.
