Prescience?
As I get older I find myself much more interested in history than when I was a young man. One of the things that I like about history is that it shows the ignorance of the liberal elites who think that their ideas are “progressive” when most of the things they think need to be done have already been tried and failed dismally, often hundreds of years ago.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.”
– Professor Alexander Tytler over 200 years ago
Many people would think the above to be “radical” thinking.while others would find it remarkable for its prescience. Both opinions are wrong. It is a simple and obvious fact. Since the American people failed to hold the federal government to their oaths to protect and defend the constitution by allowing them to appoint liberal judges to the supreme court who then go about interpreting the constitution with progressive theories the entire system of checks and balances has fallen apart.
"If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and can appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying into execution whatever can be effected by money?"
– South Carolina Senator William Draden 1828
"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one…."
– James Madison, letter to Edmund Pendleton, January 21, 1792
Numerous supreme court decisions have allowed congress to do this very thing with decisions that pervert the meaning and intent of the founding fathers so much that they would not recognize the republic that they tried so hard to protect by binding the government with the chains of the constitution.
"It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights… Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power… Our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go… In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
–Thomas Jefferson: Draft Kentucky Resolutions, 1798.
"I see,… and with the deepest affliction, the rapid strides with which the federal branch of our government is advancing towards the usurpation of all the rights reserved to the States, and the consolidation in itself of all powers, foreign and domestic; and that, too, by constructions which, if legitimate, leave no limits to their power… It is but too evident that the three ruling branches of [the Federal government] are in combination to strip their colleagues, the State authorities, of the powers reserved by them, and to exercise themselves all functions foreign and domestic."
– Thomas Jefferson to William Branch Giles, 1825.
What would Thomas Jefferson say if he saw the federal bail-outs, the healthcare bill and the erosion of property rights?
"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what is will be tomorrow."
– James Madison, Federalist no. 62, February 27, 1788
What would James Madison think of the bills running over 1,000 pages and being inscrutable even to trained lawyers?
"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that ‘all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.’ To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power not longer susceptible of any definition."
– Thomas Jefferson, Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank, February 15, 1791
Liberals, and republicans, have both had their dirty hands in this effort to increase the power of the government while the majority of the people continued voting for those whose hand-outs they approved of.
"Every State has a natural right in cases not within the compact (casus non faederis) to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits. Without this right, they would be under the dominion, absolute and unlimited, of whosoever might exercise this right of judgment for them."
– Thomas Jefferson, Draft Kentucky Resolutions
State governments are also completely bereft of any sort of intestinal fortitude having stood back and allowed the erosion of their rights as enumerated by the constitution while begging for federal largesse. They should have been refusing to recognize any federal laws which infringed on states rights or were unconstitutional but were too busy with their noses in the trough.
"It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error."
– Robert Houghwout Jackson, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and Chief Judge at the War-Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg
What can be done to stop the wilful destruction of the constitution by the very people sworn to protect it?
"[The purpose of a written constitution is] to bind up the several branches of government by certain laws, which, when they transgress, their acts shall become nullities; to render unnecessary an appeal to the people, or in other words a rebellion, on every infraction of their rights, on the peril that their acquiescence shall be construed into an intention to surrender those rights."
– Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia [1782]
If the government does not fear the people then the people will soon have cause to fear the government.
“Nor should our assembly be deluded by the integrity of their own purposes, and conclude that these unlimited powers will never be abused, because themselves are not disposed to abuse them. They should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.”
– Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia [1782]
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The founding fathers foresaw what would happen if one of the branches of government grew too powerful, their words remind us that men cannot be trusted with power and need to be constrained by rules. They did the best job they could of putting the necessary rules into the constitution but the people became complacent and many of them greedy for what the toils of other men had earned, thinking it their right.
We can only hope that it is not too late.
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