Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

A promise of slavery from the Democratic party

“Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction. A good form of government may hold the rotten materials together for some time, but beyond a certain pitch, even the best constitution will be ineffectual, and slavery must ensue.”
— John Witherspoon, The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men, 1776

I used to laugh at the stereotypical zealots with the sandwich boards declaring “the end is near”. Lately I’m beginning to think they were right, just not quite in the way they meant. The Democratic party leadership understands John Witherspoon quite well I think.

They have voiced their contempt for our constitution. It is after all to them nothing more than a “charter of negative liberties” and any questions of adhering to its restrictions upon Congress are dismissed with “that’s not a serious question”. It no longer restrains our Congress from spending money for purposes outside those which it authorizes.

The majority of our people have come to expect government to provide for them. On the radio we are occasionally treated to anecdotal evidence of this. A few days ago a woman called a major talk radio show to tell about a friend of hers. Her friend makes roughly $15,000 per year – an income well below what we consider the poverty level. Out of that income the government took a couple of hundred dollars for taxes through income withholding. At the end of the year they received a tax refund with rebates of several thousand dollars. I don’t recall the exact numbers, but it was well over twenty times what they paid out thanks to “earned income credits”, “child credits” and the like. Through state and federal welfare programs of one form or another they made a total income of over $32,000. It’s still not much, but the government provided more than half of their income!

People in this situation have little incentive to do anything about it. Even a modest increase in their income can cost them their government provided benefits. It’s as if the government were punishing them for trying to improve their situation. And watch out if anyone should threaten to reduce these benefits as an incentive to make them become self-reliant.

I’ve seen this sort of thing myself. I know a young lady whose situation is very similar, as well as another young lady who lived in a similar situation in the past but whose situation has improved – primarily because she found real work that paid a good wage. But think about it. She had to find work that provided more than double what she had been actually earning beforehand in order to break even.

Let’s set the way-back machine to the 1930s shall we? The nation’s economy was in terrible shape. Unemployment rates were high and there was a tremendous disparity between the wealthy and the poor. The man who eventually became the president that our current president hopes to surpass had this to say...

“Every man has a right to life; and this means that he has also a right to make a comfortable living.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

This was a complete redefinition of the right to life. Beforehand we might have said that the right to the pursuit of happiness meant that he had a right to seek a comfortable living, but Roosevelt declared it to be a right to make a comfortable living. And this alleged right was implicit in the right to life.

Imagine that – apparently it is government’s duty to secure not just our life and our liberty, but also our comfort! Now admittedly, Roosevelt didn’t quite take this idea that far – it would never have gotten past the people in 1932. But he did imply if you were willing to work that you were entitled to a comfortable living. The type of work, and the amount of work had nothing to do with it. Your employer was apparently obligated to pay you enough to live comfortably without regard for the economic value of your work. After all in that same address, he also said that private wealth was a public trust.

Today of course the Democratic party and their constituents want to take things even further. We’ve watched as they abrogate the law of contracts (demanding that executives pay back what are considered to be “outrageous” executive pay and bonuses – even where those bonuses are contractual obligations of the companies paying them) in violation of the constitution. But we’re also told – loudly and often that we have a “right” to quality affordable health care. Where this right comes from I don’t know, but I’m sure it must be an extension of Roosevelt’s perversion of the right to life. After all, if he had been able to pull it off he’d have nationalized health care in the 1930s. He stopped short of that goal though because he knew he wouldn’t be able to get popular support for it.

Think for a moment though what this alleged right to health care implies. As I see it the “right” to health care implies that we have a right to the inventions and labor of others to suit our own needs. In other words, this right supercedes the right to property (and hence liberty) of the doctors and hospitals that provide us with health care, as well as the right of doctors to seek their own comfortable living through their chosen career. This “right” allows us to make slaves of medical professionals and to take from them their property through the enforced usage of their diagnostic equipment and the taking of their supplies.

It should be obvious – there’s a major difference between the rights of the individual as enumerated by our founders – rights that they saw as self evident gifts of our creator and the rights that Roosevelt and his successors believed in and that today’s citizen seems to not be able to do without. That difference is fairly straightforward too.

The primary distinction between the individual unalienable rights of men and the “rights” of today is that the former are the things that we may do for ourselves, while the latter are things that we require others to do for us. In other words, they are the difference between liberty and slavery, liberty and tyranny. The rights of liberty are sustainable – they are indefeasable. The rights of tyranny are not sustainable – when they eventually become impossible for our government to provide government will withhold them – and thereby take away the last of our liberties as we become slaves to the government in exchange for something that was never ours to forcibly take from others in the first place.