by Allen West
This is one of my biggest frustrations and concerns about America. Our electorate doesn’t have a freaking clue about who we are or from whence we came. Too many voters seem to be mindless lemmings who fall prey to droning gimmicks and slogans like “Hope and Change” or “Forward.” Even more disturbing is a media industry and “intellectual” elite who are complicit in not taking to task or challenging the empty, rhetorical, poll-tested crap being fed to our country.
If you have a son or daughter who is a senior in high school, ask him or her to define natural law and popular sovereignty. Ask your child who Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are. But first see if you can answer those questions yourself.
Earlier I mentioned watching the movie Cromwell as a boy. It was because I had parents who forced me to read and learn beyond the education I was receiving that I grew to appreciate not only history but my own country. They inspired in me an inquisitiveness I maintain today.
John Locke, the classical liberal Englishman, gave our Founding Fathers a blueprint to create the world’s longest-running constitutional republic. Locke also gave us the governing philosophy we now call conservatism. I find it kinda funny that these folks who today call themselves liberals really have no clue what they are and what they represent. Unfortunately, those in power do. These liberal elites do not represent the governing philosophy of classical liberalism but rather the postmodern kind, which seeks not to increase the power of the individual but the power of the state.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. First I want to share the modern conservative governing principles for which I so proudly stand guard.
Chapter 5
GOVERNING PRINCIPLES
The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.
—PATRICK HENRY
History, in general, only informs us what bad government is. Most bad government has grown out of too much government.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
—JAMES MADISON, The Federalist Papers
America stands today as the longest-running constitutional republic. It is surely one of humanity’s greatest political feats that an insignificant collection of thirteen colonies could band together, fight a revolution against the greatest power in the world, and create a government—all at the same time.
Our Founding Fathers were incredibly learned. They understood profoundly the complexity of their task. From the words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence to the brilliance of James Madison in the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, they created something that had previously existed only in theories and dreams.
Is America a perfect place? Well, of course we can’t ever hope to be perfect, but our founders wanted us to be the best and greatest provider of opportunity to those who have and will set foot upon our shores (preferably legally).
At the time of our nation’s creation, even its citizens had trouble wrapping their minds around this new concept of governance. According to accounts of the day, the founders and deputies chosen for the Constitutional Convention of 1787 worked behind closed doors. Anxious citizens gathered outside, waiting for results. As the doors opened and the delegates emerged, a Mrs. Powell of Philadelphia stopped Benjamin Franklin and asked him point-blank, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Without hesitation he responded, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” Even at the time of its founding, our nation’s creators realized the difficulty of maintaining freedom, liberty, and checks and balances when doing so depended solely on the will of the people.
Thomas Jefferson looked into the future when he said, “Freedom is lost gradually from an uninterested, uninformed, and uninvolved people.” I wonder if he also foresaw reality TV shows? Sadly, his prediction is coming true. A quickly expanding portion of our electorate has no understanding of—and worse, no interest in learning about—the philosophical foundations and governing principles of its own nation.
While Jefferson and the framers of the Constitution could only guess what would happen in the future to their new republic, there can be no doubt they had learned the lessons of the past. From their more contemporary European political philosophers to those of ancient Greece and Rome, our founders recognized there had to be a careful balance of power and a fundamental belief in the rights of the individual for their bold experiment to succeed.
So what were the governing principles the founders established for America? I believe there were six: limited government, fiscal responsibility, a free market, individual sovereignty, a strong national defense, and an understanding that all of man’s freedoms come ultimately from God.
When they created this nation, limited government was at the top of the founders’ list. In the forty-sixth of eighty-five essays known now as the Federalist Papers, it was James Madison who wrote: “the ambitious encroachments of the federal government, on the authority of the state governments, would not excite the opposition of a single state, or of a few states only. They would be signals of general alarm.” Today in America we are witnessing the encroachment of the federal government into nearly every aspect of our lives. Amazingly, people seem to have become almost immune to this encroachment, as long as they can maintain a tolerable existence. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the movie The Matrix, where there were two worlds: the real world, where I live, and a virtual world, where many Americans prefer to exist because they are free to indulge every pleasure—even at the cost of their own free will.
In June 1788, when 168 Virginia delegates met to ratify or reject the Constitution, James Madison warned that liberty could quietly slip away as “abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments were more frequent by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
Being from the South, I always like to make an analogy between encroaching government and boiling a frog. You never want to toss the frog into a pot of boiling water. Instead, you plop the happy little frog in a pot of cold water and slowly but surely turn up the heat. It is no different with today’s expansive growth of government into our daily lives.
While you’re waiting for the water to boil, you might take a quick read of the entire Declaration of Independence to get a sense of the encroachment Jefferson experienced “under a long train of abuses and usurpations.”
The purpose of the Declaration of Independence was to lay out the grievances of the thirteen colonies against an intrusive and invasive monarchical government. The list of twenty-seven grievances described by Jefferson and signed by fifty-six patriots formed the foundation for the republic’s guiding principle of limited government.
In his book The Founders’ Key, Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry Arnn eloquently presented the relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution:
The arrangements of the Constitution have a way of organizing our actions so as to produce certain desirable results, and they have done this more reliably than any governing instrument in the history of man. Connect these arrangements to the beauty of the Declaration and one has something inspiring and commanding.
Our country is now at risk of forgetting the value of limited government. We are told bigger government is necessary for the general welfare of our citizens. Instead of sticking to its primary constitutional tasks of promoting the general welfare and providing for the common defense, we have a government that is focused on providing welfare, and who cares about defense? As the temperature in the pot heats up, we have gradually moved from securing the endorsed inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to demanding a “guarantee of happiness.” But to guarantee happiness, the government’s powers must be unlimited.
If government’s power is unlimited, its spending will most likely be as well
, for how better to retain power? In 1850 the French economist and classic liberal theorist Frédéric Bastiat predicted what we would be living through 160 years later in his essay “The Law”: “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
Politicians know exactly what they need to do to get reelected, and building and maintaining big government has become a huge business.
In Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, the dashing Latin copper magnate Francisco d’Anconia delivered a warning we should heed today:
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed.
Can it be our grand experiment in liberty, freedom, and democracy has run its course? Can it be we have reached a tipping point from which there is no possible return? Are we looking into the abyss with one foot dangling over the edge? I certainly hope not. But we would be wise to heed the warnings. By the mid-1800s, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville already knew what dire fate might await us:
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 being that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
Our nation now has a massive debt of seventeen trillion dollars. If the government were to set aside one dollar per second, it would take 31,688 years to pay off just one trillion, and 507,008 years to pay off the other sixteen—not including the interest on the debt. But you and every other taxpayer in this nation for generations to come are on the hook for all of it. The only way the government can pay off the debt or spend more is to take more from you. And it doesn’t seem to me that government’s voracious appetite will slow down anytime soon.
The idea that governments, not the free market, could stimulate demand and growth was chiefly promoted in the 1930s by John Maynard Keynes, a British economist and early progressive. In fact Keynes was also a proponent of eugenics, which advocates improving human hereditary traits by promoting higher reproduction among more desired people and reduced reproduction from those deemed less so—an idea shared by a certain infamous figure in Germany.
Nonetheless Keynes’s theories were widely adopted by Western economies from the 1940s through the 1960s, until they began to fail in the 1970s. No economy has ever thrived when governments continually raise taxes to spend money they don’t have. Alexander Hamilton, our first secretary of the treasury, knew exactly why this could never work in a free society: “If congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare … the powers of congress would subvert the very foundation, the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America.” I only wish our recent and current treasury secretaries held the same belief.
Obviously our Founding Fathers recognized that an invasive and intrusive government would need ever more revenue through ever more onerous taxation to feed its exponential growth, which is why fiscal responsibility was number two on their list of governing principles.
Today, under the guise of so-called benevolence, terms like shared sacrifice, fairness, fair share, and economic patriotism are used to justify higher taxes. Such terms guilt the citizenry into accepting the system of legal plunder.
But even plunder runs out eventually, and those being plundered tend not to agree to it willingly. As Jefferson understood, “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
Jefferson also believed that “to compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” I am quite certain our founders would abhor the immense national debt accrued since January 2009 when the Obama administration shifted spending into high gear. Jefferson warned us to “place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.” Maybe at the next Democrat-hosted Jefferson-Jackson dinner, they’ll read that quote. After all, it comes from the person they’re supposedly celebrating.
If a government is truly limited in its scope, it naturally operates within its constitutionally prescribed duties and responsibilities. However, when government extends its mandates under the guise of “benevolence” but in practice doles out rewards for electoral allegiance, it becomes fiscally irresponsible.
We continually hear the emotional argument about government providing a safety net for those who have fallen on hard times or who have no means of support. There is no doubt that as a nation we should take care of those who have fallen off the ladder of opportunity. But the problem is, the safety net gradually becomes a hammock.
There’s nothing new about this problem. Benjamin Franklin recognized it when he offered his own solution: “I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing such good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”
Measured against our fundamental governing principles, we clearly do not have good government—heck, we suck! We have excessive debt, growing poverty, exploding deficits, an expanding nanny state, and an anemic economy. The sad thing is, there seems to be no reprieve in sight. Why? Because, as a nation, we have become uninterested, uninformed, and disengaged from the truth. In these almost Orwellian times, when the government routinely makes up doublespeak phrases like “man-caused disasters,” and government officials regularly lie about everything from their personal lives to the cost of government-run health care, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. I’m not sure anyone would accuse me of starting a revolution, but I know from experience that telling the truth doesn’t always win friends.
Regarding the third governing principle of a free market, our nation was founded on the belief in a higher authority, that we all have the right to pursue happiness by our own will, limited only by our own determination to produce. And as we produce for ourselves, we create greater opportunities for others as well. But when this free marketplace of ideas and personal enterprise is made subject to the power of those in government, the economy withers, and so do freedom and liberty. In the words of James Madison in essay fourteen of the Federalist Papers: “As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.”
The most dangerous result of government’s stranglehold on the free market is the slow and steady erosion of our country’s most important resource: the individual. Madison knew the rights of the individual needed to be paramount, for “the rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects for the protection of which Government was instituted.”
Our founders realized that government had to be limited, for if it was limited, it would more likely be fiscally responsible. And if it was fiscally responsible, it could not usurp the capital and therefore the individual sovereignty of its citizens.
This fourth fundamental governing principle of individual sovereignty was as essential as the first two in ensuring the existence of the nation. According to our founders, the government should never seek to subjugate the individual to the state—quite the opposite. We must never forget that our Constitution was not deemed complete until it included a Bill of Rights.
We are currently experiencing an onslaught against one of our constitutional rights, the Second Amendment, which guara
ntees the right of the people to keep and bear arms. When the coauthor of this amendment, George Mason, was asked what he meant by a “militia,” he replied, “It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.” Our founders realized an armed American is a citizen, but an unarmed American is a subject. They wrote the Second Amendment to ensure we never lost our rights to the first—or our rights to freedom itself. Mason’s fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson made clear that “The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”
If we are to live up to the governing principles our founders established, then we have a mighty responsibility to preserve the power of the individual citizen. We must resist government’s constant fearmongering and exploitation of our sympathies, which cause us to gradually and imperceptibly surrender individual sovereignty and liberty, drip by drip. For as Benjamin Franklin warned, “those who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.”
Our own Civil War was fought to ensure we did indeed hold these truths of our Declaration of Independence to be self-evident, and we must forever defend that legacy against countless challenges, foreign and domestic. It is the latter that is most threatening. For as Abraham Lincoln said, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”