This seems more important than ever, seeing as how the last two administrations don’t believe that our forefathers were right to keep government out of our business. As Benjamin Franklin said:
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Happy Fourth of July to my fellow Americans, and to my fellow Americans in spirit.
Two hundred and thirty seven years ago, our forefathers gave us this:
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Read the whole thing, in its original document. And then weep because of our current political class.
God bless America, and vote the bastards out.
It is sobering to read the Declaration today and realize that most of the actions of King George and Parliament that the Patriots objected to are now the settled policies of the US government, including levying high taxes and a plethora of officials sent to eat up our substance.
And yet, there is something about Franklin’s famous aphorism that has always troubled me. I might put it this way: Those who are unwilling to make some reasonable accomodations to liberty in order to secure safety, will get neither liberty nor safety. I can illustrate this countermaxim by the example of one of those royal policies the Patriots objected to, but which we have today in the US: a standing army. Hostility to a standing army was one of the most entrenched objections the Patriots had, inherited from the English Civil War. In that conflict Parliament did not trust the King with an army, for fear of it being used to crush English liberties. Worse, once the King was overthrown, the New Model Army raised by Parliament staged a coup and dismissed Parliament. It then proceeded to rule the country, under Lord Protector Cromwell, with the sort of lifestyle tyranny we see today in places like Iran. Christmas and May Day celebrations were prohibited, church-going enforced, etc. (Of course, for Jews there was another side, too. It was under Cromwell, and at his insistence, that Jews were once more allowed to openly reside in England).
Getting back to the objection to standing armies, the Patriots had good cause to distrust them. The Royal government had tried to put garrisons into American cities. Ostensibly, these soldiers were there to protect the colonists from the Indians. But they were stationed in the seaboard cities and not on the frontier where the Indian threat existed. That was plain evidence that they were there to intimidate the colonists, not to protect them.
But today we have a standing army (and Air Force, and Navy, and Marine Corps). If we look at the history of the last century, we can realize that having a standing army was essential to the preservation of liberty during that period. Just imagine trying to protect the country against Nazi Germany or the Communist USSR without maintaining trained, standing, well-equipped, professional military forces. A standing army might have been an anathema to the Patriots in 1776, but is was essential to preserving liberty over the last century, and remains so today.
The same argument of necessity can be made for intelligence services, including the NSA, although here it is more problematical, since the recent revelations of wholesale data collection together with the other recent revelations about abuse of power by the IRS and the DoJ gives rise to the conclusion that this data vacuuming was not intended against enemies of the country, but against the citizen body and the political opponents of the administration. That is indeed an abuse of power, of the sort Franklin was denouncing, and a case where the compromise of liberty will not lead to any more security. It has been to the Islamic enemies of the US that the agencies of the government carrying out these actions has been giving a pass, while concentrating their efforts against American citizens not involved in such hostile activities. The ludicrous and lying assertion of the administration and their sychophantic “professional” civil servants that the Tea Parties are a terrorist threat illustrates this abuse of power.
Ironically, those who are bent on destroying liberty in domestic affairs through the expansion of th welfare state, ever engorging taxation/spending by the governments, spying on and harassing political opponents like the Tea Partiers, and meddling busybodiness over food and other personal matters, are implacably hostile to the standing military that, as I believe, history shows to be an absolutely essential compromise between liberty and security, and almost the only aspect of the objections to the royal government of 1776 in the Declaration that should be an acceptable policy now, precisely in order to secure our liberties.