“I weep for the liberty of my country when I see at this early day of its successful experiment that corruption has been imputed to many members of the House of Representatives, and the rights of the people have been bartered for promises of office.”
On Jan. 8, 1815, American militiamen under the command of General Andrew Jackson won the biggest victory of the War of 1812 against an invading British force of nearly twice its size at the Battle of New Orleans. The British had close to 2,000 casualties, while only eight Americans were killed and 13 wounded. Ironically, due to the slow speed of communications at the time, the victory came two weeks after the war of 1812 officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent.
It’s been ten years. Federal government intervention into America’s local-and-state-run public schools has spent a lot of money, but not resulted in much good, down at the student level:
“What connects two thousand years of genocide? Too much power in too few hands.”
On Jan. 7, 1979, invading Vietnamese troops captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, toppling the brutal regime of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot had attempted to establish an agrarian utopia, evacuating the cities and closing schools and factories. He abolished private property and created collective farms. Intellectuals and skilled workers were killed and modern technology outlawed. An estimated two million Cambodians died by execution, forced labor, and starvation.
On this day in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a State of the Union address in which he proclaimed, “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.”
Two of those four freedoms — of speech and worship — are enshrined in our First Amendment. But the other two were new: “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear.”
No one desires people to go wanting or folks to be afraid, of course, though sometimes fear can usefully spur us to take corrective action. But while government can capably protect freedom of speech and religion, it cannot magically wipe out want or fear.
Wants are unlimited; fears can be, too.
When a child wakes up crying from a nightmare, do we need a government program? When a fellow member of the “Me Generation” fervently desires a new iPad, should Uncle Sam provide it?
FDR wasn’t talking about iPads or bad dreams, but his new notions were so loose and fuzzy that they changed the conception of government from a limited association protecting our individual ability to pursue happiness into an unlimited institution powerful enough to create a society without want or fear.
Government has a role in protecting us from invasion or attack, from crime, but it cannot provide freedom from fear. Government has a role in protecting our economic freedom to produce and trade, to engage in commerce, but it cannot fulfill our every want.
We lose what we can achieve when we demand what cannot be given to us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.