Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.
“By such words, Hydarnes, you give us no good counsel,” replied the Lacedaemonians, “because you have experienced merely the advantage of which you speak; you do not know the privilege we enjoy. You have the honor of the king’s favor; but you know nothing about liberty, what relish it has and how sweet it is. For if you had any knowledge of it, you yourself would advise us to defend it, not with lance and shield, but with our very teeth and nails.”
July 6 marks some horrific attacks upon individual liberty — indeed, on individuals’ lives. In 1415, Jan Hus is burned at the stake. In 1535, King Henry VIII of England has Sir Thomas More executed for treason. In 1939, the Nazis close the last remaining Jewish enterprises in Germany. Exactly three years later, Anne Frank and her family go into hiding.
California’s Democratic legislative majority is anything but lazy. On July 3, when most politicians had long-since left their posts to begin vacationing, California legislators kept their collective nose to the grindstone, busy trying to grind down the right of citizens to petition their government.
Again.
Last year, California’s initiative process withstood multiple attacks. One would have required petitioners to wear signs on their chest stating whether or not they were paid. Another would have outlawed paying petitioners per signature.
Nary a Republican voted for these bills; thankfully, Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, vetoed both. He suggested government shouldn’t force citizens to wear signs on their chests and noted, “It doesn’t seem very practical to me to create a system that makes productivity goals a crime.”
Undeterred, the Assembly Elections Committee passed ACA 10, which would require constitutional amendment initiatives to qualify by running petition drives in 27 state senate districts. This, on top of the current requirement to gather more than a million voter signatures statewide,
Well-heeled interests would be able to afford the higher costs. Grassroots groups? Not so much.
Further, ACA 10 mandates that constitutional amendments proposed by citizens through the initiative must garner a supermajority of 55 percent to pass. This would allow big spending-unions or wealthy individuals or big corporations to defeat reform measures even when a majority of voters favor the measure.
Legislators claim the constitution should not be changed by a slim majority. Yet, ACA 10 doesn’t increase the simple majority currently required when it comes to amendments that legislators propose.
Legislators are working overtime to get those pesky citizen reformers out of their way.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Jim Dixon, Kingsley Amis’s infamous Lucky Jim, put the logic of wealth redistribution in everyday terms: “If one man’s got ten buns and another’s got two, and a bun has got to be given up by one of them, then surely you take it from the man with ten buns.” Remarkably simple, leaving out, as it does,
Think about it longer than a minute, and it’s easy to see that the “soak-the-rich” plan quickly runs into trouble, one bit of difficulty neatly stated in the old adage often attributed to Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
Sometimes you even run out of other people. As France may show next.
Socialists there have won the recent elections. They promise to reinstate the old, ugly wealth tax, as well as up the income tax on “the rich.” And so of course some of the richer French folks contemplate exile — at least as far as the welcoming cantons of Switzerland.
There are problems with this option, though. Under Sarkozy, the French government had instituted a whopping exit tax. But, if Mathieu van Berchem is to be believed, even this will prove “unlikely to stop any ‘exodus.’ There are often more reasons to leave than to stay, while the Socialist government could turn on the wealthy even more.”
If so, expect future French buns to have Swiss crosses stamped upon them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth.
On July 5, 1687, Isaac Newton publishes the work for which he is most honored, the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. In 1811 on the same date, Venezuela declares independence from Spain. In 1819, Admiral William Cornwallis dies. In 1937, Hormel introduces SPAM, the canned “meat” product, which helps America win World War II. In 1945, U.S. declares the Philippines liberated. In 1947, Larry Doby joins the Cleveland Indians, becoming the American League’s first black player. In 1971 on this date, President Richard Nixon signs the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, lowering the voting age to 18 years.
The most important document in American history is titled this way, in five lines: “In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776./ A DECLARATION / By the REPRESENTATIVES of the
/ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, / In GENERAL CONGRESS assembled.” This “Declaration of Independence” begins with one of the best preambles ever: “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.”
And it then goes on to assert a vital philosophical position: “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 was a document that changed American history — and the world’s. But it wasn’t the only one to do so: The United States’ Constitution followed in 1787. But some documents can’t be fit onto a broadside. In a Saturday Review article published on July 4, 1953, historian Eric F. Goldman identified 13 “Books That Changed America.” These books were Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, The Federalist Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps, Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Lincoln Steffens’s Autobiography, and Wendell L. Willkie’s One World.
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.
We don’t often ask for your financial support, but we can only continue with your support. Make a monthly pledge of $17.76 to Citizens in Charge. Or make a one-time gift today for $25 — or $100! — or whatever you can afford to give.
“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?
If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.