Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.
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Category: Common Sense
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The Price of Liberty
Happy Independence Day!
Though I understand if you are not feeling all that exultant, today.
Last week’s Supreme Court decision allowing the unconstitutional 2,700-page monstrosity known as Obamacare to stand was, well, bracing. We can soberly see how far our great country has fallen from the Republic our Founders envisioned. And how long and hard the battle will be to restore our country.
Let’s face it: We’re headed in the wrong direction. Unless we change course, our children and grandchildren will never know the freedom and opportunity and security that we have known. Can we accept such a fate? Can we live with it? Can we even bear to go to our graves with it?
On this day 236 years ago, not only did the United States of America break away from the monarchical and mercantilist British Empire, but we did so with a Declaration of Independence that spoke to “a candid world,” firing up the hearts and minds of people everywhere.
The Declaration served, in its day, as the most eloquent expression of the equality and dignity of each individual human being … of our inviolate right to freedom. It continues to do so today.
Freedom fighters worldwide have long been inspired by the simple words of our Founders … speaking truth to power:
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 — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
It falls to us, today, to restore some semblance of this precious freedom.
The enemies of freedom are powerful and entrenched — but remember, they were at the founding, too.
Of course, today’s situation has a somewhat different complexion. The public employee unions (basically, the government itself) are now the biggest spending and most powerful special interests in our politics. Crony phony-capitalists (Solyndra and many more) join them to feed at the federal trough, gorging on our tax dollars, wallowing in the borrowed money that threatens collapse and catastrophe. They push ever more power into the hands of politicians and their special-interest clients.
Though whopping majorities of citizens favor balanced budgets, limited government, and common-sense checks on power — term limits and the right to initiative, referendum and recall — our so-called representatives ignore the will of the people. Their spending and debt and nanny-statism know no bounds. They sue to overturn our votes and fashion a maze of unconstitutional rules to block our political participation.
Today’s warning isn’t “the redcoats are coming!” it’s “the turncoats are in charge!”
We can’t count on politicians or judges to save us. We can only count on each other.
Benjamin Franklin said, “We must hang together or we shall surely all hang separately.”
This Common Sense program, in the spirit of Tom Paine’s famous pamphlet that inspired our revolution, is my effort to educate, to excite citizens to action, to entertain at times, and to unite us in our common cause.
From highlighting today’s grassroots freedom-fighters to lambasting the mindless nanny-state busybodies in high places, Common Sense is a daily shot heard ’round the world.
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“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it,” Paine wrote to “the inhabitants of America.”
My goal in these commentaries is to add punch and verve to the movement, vanquishing fatigue so we can fight on.
Freedom is worth it. The only way to beat the odds is to fight.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
P.S. Just as in Paine’s day, and in his words, “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
P.P.S. Thank YOU for stepping up today and helping keep this program alive and kicking. Your monthly pledge of $17.76 or a one-time gift of $100, $50, $25 or $15 keeps us passing the ammunition. Please contribute. Why not do it now?
On April 29, 1429, Joan of Arc entered the eastern gate of the city of Orleans to relieve French forces badly in need of supplies and more soldiers. Barely a week later, on May 8, the English siege of Orleans was broken by the French.
On April 29, 1945, the U.S. Seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division liberated Dachau, the first concentration camp established by Germany’s Nazi regime, just five weeks after Hitler became chancellor in 1933.
On April 29, 1992, three days of rioting erupted after four Los Angeles police officers — videotaped beating Rodney King with Billy clubs, after a high-speed car chase and subsequent confrontation — were acquitted of wrongdoing. Rioters in south-central Los Angeles blocked freeway traffic and beat motorists, damaged and looted downtown stores and buildings, and set more than 100 fires. On May 1, President George Bush ordered military troops and riot-trained federal officers to LA and by the end of the next day the city was under control. In three days of disorder, 55 people were killed, almost 2,000 injured, 7,000 people were arrested, and nearly $1 billion in property damage reported, including the burnings of nearly 4,000 buildings. Rodney King had been released without charges after his arrest. The four police officers, acquitted of state charges on this day, were later prosecuted under federal law for violating Rodney King’s constitutional rights. Two officers were convicted, and sentenced to 2½ years in prison, and two were acquitted of the federal charges.
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Democracy Sans Factions?
It’s worth remembering, as Democrats proceed with programs that have failed in the past and as Republican insiders strive to rig their own nomination process, that the political parties are private organizations. They are not governments.
They are groups of people working to gain control over government — and that control can only ever be temporary. Let us hope.
Over many years of activism in politics I’ve supported openness in elections and ballot access, working for a variety of reforms, including the securing of the rights to initiative, referendum and recall. I’ve also contemplated a few less simple ideas, like Instant Runoff Voting and proportional representation, both designed to break (or at least ease up on) the stranglehold that the two-party system has over American democracy.
But additional reforms are worth thinking about. One, for instance, would prohibit any mention of a party name on a ballot.
Since the parties are private groups, they ought not have special access to the public ballot. All the more because the two parties are a problem in and of themselves — their perennial clamor for power perverts political discourse, unnecessarily restricting and channeling the direction of debate.
Such rules already hold sway in many county and municipal governments throughout the country. It could be instructive to study the differences in politicking and policy.
For todays’ growing ranks of independent and unaffiliated voters, perhaps the motivations in favor wouldn’t wholly be rational, but partly vengeful.
And perhaps partisans might wish to consider the reasons for that kind of anti-partisan sentiment.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Credit George Washington for mobilizing our military to win the Revolutionary War. It was Thomas Paine, though, who did the most to mobilize the people in support of the cause of freedom and independence from Britain. He did it with his stirring pamphlet, Common Sense.
Originally published anonymously on this very date 235 years ago, and addressed to “the Inhabitants of America,” Paine’s polemic circulated to a higher percentage of the American population than any book save the Bible.
One reason for its success was Paine’s style, which was much more accessible to the common person than most political writing of that time. In fact, Common Sense was read aloud in public, allowing citizens who lacked letters to engage in the debate over separation from the British empire — some seven months before the Declaration of Independence.
Common Sense attacked both the evils of monarchy, generally, noting that “Monarchy is ranked in scripture as one of the sins …” and the British monarchy specifically, referring to William the Conqueror as a “French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives.”
Paine’s pamphlet cogently endorsed republican forms of future government. “Society in every state is a blessing,” he wrote, “but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.…”
More than two centuries after its publication, Paine’s message still rings prophetic: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
That remains true. And Paine’s mission remains ours: To resist tyranny, to “prepare an asylum for mankind.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
This episode was written immediately after the events of 9/11/01.
This is war. And on our shores. Thousands of American citizens murdered in cold blood. But despite our pain and suffering as a people, we are still strong. Not only militarily, but also in our love of freedom and our commitment to defend it come what may.
Some have argued that America will never be the same. In a sense that’s true: we’ll certainly never forget this savage and senseless attack. And we have much work to do to make certain it doesn’t happen again. But it’s important to be careful how we go about it.
In the wake of this unprecedented brutality, two out of three Americans say they would be willing to trade some civil liberties to get more security. But this is isn’t our real choice. Nothing about increasing our security requires abridging our civil rights. We don’t have to let the terrorists win, not in any respect. For these terrorists would like nothing better than to knock America off our foundation, our principles, the things that make us truly the greatest country the world has ever known. They hate our freedom. Let’s sustain that freedom. Let’s show the whole world: we are the same America.
The same America whose rifle shot for freedom was heard ’round the world in 1776, and is still being heard today. The same America that freed Europe from the Nazis and Asia from imperial Japan. Let it be known in the face of this terror today that we are indeed the same America, the land of the free and the home of the brave.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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