Personal Liberties

 By Veritas Omnia Vincit

VOV’s back with another timely read, this time on the encroachment of Big Government into our personal freedoms, something our Forefathers knew something about. These men went to war against the world’s finest military to gain the freedoms we have today. But do we really have what the Founders envisioned? Read on:

Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem or high ideals that bear no fruit in today’s United States.

 “I prefer a dangerous freedom to peaceful servitude.” Alternatively translated as “I prefer the tumult of liberty over the quiet of servitude.”

 Oops, didn’t I write this before? Let’s try a few other founders and see what they say about personal freedom.

 “Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.” – John Adams, 1765

 “In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example … of charters of power granted by liberty. This revolution in the practice of the world, may, with an honest praise, be pronounced the most triumphant epoch of its history, and the most consoling presage of its happiness.” – James Madison, Essays for the National Gazette, 1792

 “It will not be denied that power is of an encroaching nature and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.” – James Madison, Federalist 48, 1788

 “I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.” – Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, 1787

So what does all that mean to each of you today, in real terms? As gun control concerns continue to bicker about their worries over the loss of even one life and how we must all do “something” to make us safer it is an interesting time in the United States. We are arguably safer than almost anytime in the last 50 years with respect to our odds of being murdered and yet we have millions of fearful Americans cowering in their homes frightened by something that happens less than death by falling.

Not a very “dangerous freedom” if we’re being honest. Our freedom, such as it is today, is relatively safe for virtually all Americans. Those who choose to make a living in the illegal drug trade comprise the bulk of those killed by gunfire in the United States. The remainder are a sad mix between domestic violence victims, robbery and other assorted criminal acts. If you choose to make your living outside of the drug trade you have pretty good odds at getting to retirement. Again not much of a dangerous freedom.

So why the constant badgering by gun control advocates for our safety? Once again it’s never about the safety of the public at large it’s about control over the public at large. The founders knew that, if they knew nothing else they knew a people disarmed were not very capable of frightening the machinations of the state powers against them. Leaving them little more than defenseless serfs in the yokes of their feudal lords and masters. The founders knew the history of the world to that point, they knew their own history. Human history is not replete with stories of free peoples exercising their personal liberties while enjoying the free pursuits of their own labors. No, our human history is something else altogether. Darker, filled with tales of conquered peoples being forced to do the bidding of their masters or being slaughtered wholesale.

The founders recognized that even though a government is a necessary thing, it’s never a good thing and it needs to be constantly restrained. Madison’s quote above is a small part of his many writings about the ability of power to slip its bonds and encroach on the rights of a free people. The government is not a thing to be trusted, to be allowed ever more power in an ill-advised pursuit of a safety that is nothing more than illusion.

I’ve long advocated against the government’s constant encroachments into our personal liberties, mostly to no avail if I’m being honest because we are now a nation of largely apathetic wienies content to be tax and wage slaves as long as some entertainment is provided along the way. Let’s watch football and not care if I can’t collect rain falling from the sky because my government tells me they own the water in the sky before it lands on my own property. Let’s go to a baseball game and never consider why we don’t own our own bodies in the United States. Those questions are boring and disrupt our sense of who we are. We believe ourselves a free people, and certainly compared to many other nations we still enjoy a rather large amount of liberty of a sort.

But do we enjoy that dangerous freedom? I think not. We happily and quietly surrender our privacy to the government as a means of protecting ourselves without considering what we are giving up. We rolled over and allowed asset forfeiture without due process, we said nothing as a people. Thankfully Timbs vs Indiana puts us on a path to retaking some of those property rights we so easily surrendered. We agree that the words “Congress shall make no law” means that Congress can actually make a few laws because they seem reasonable to us. The “reasonable” restriction approach has proven most successful in allowing the government a consistent and constant encroachment on the first amendment, the second, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth is all but a joke these days, the eighth, and to some extent the fourteenth.

For me there are no “reasonable” restrictions on any amendment for any reason. There are only restrictions and as such represent an infringement that was never intended by the founders of this nation who envisioned a nation of hard working, free people ready to take up their weapons and defend these shores. We have something very different today, and in many ways it’s something of a far lesser value.

When your government owns your body you’re not a free people, when the government decides you can’t ever keep your property without continually paying an annual tithe to that government you’re not a free people. When your representatives have spent your grandchildren into debt, you’re not a free people.

The question for me is what kind of nation exists for my children and now my grandchildren in twenty, or thirty, or fifty years. I suspect today’s relatively unfree United States will look infinitely more free than the one a half century into our future.

Freedom is never free as Jefferson points out, the gun control debate is but a small component of the loss of our freedoms. Many conservative sites base their entire defense of the Bill of Rights around the attacks against the second amendment. I would suggest we should all consider the same passionate defense of the less interesting amendments as the groundwork for encroachment of the second starts with excessive police powers of search and seizure, warrantless searches, and constant monitoring of every electronic communication by a government less concerned with protecting the rights of those it represents and far more concerned with protecting its power over those it supposedly represents.

I’m going to keep hammering away at this subject because it’s very near and dear to my heart and it forms the basis for much of how I view out nation at any given moment. Next time out perhaps it’s time we take a look at the man who deeply influenced the founders, especially Jefferson’s, notions of personal liberty and freedom. That man was John Locke.

Tell me your thoughts on how free you really are in today’s United States.

VoV

 

Category: Government Incompetence, Guest Post, Politics