Liberty for Kids

On spending money you don't have

2012-02-07T21:06:00.000-05:00

I spend money,
I don't have.
To buy things,
I don't need.
To impress people,
I don't know.

I found the above poem on a discussion board. I don't know who to attribute it to but I thought it was too good to not share. As my children get older I find myself counselling them about not falling for the trap of celebrity worship, reckless consumerism, and deriving self-worth from material things. Just as government can enslave us through reckless spending and borrowing, we can enslave ourselves by our own reckless buying and borrowing. There is a lot of freedom in living debt free. And character can be built through delayed gratification.

Indoctrinating the Grasshopper Generation

2012-01-26T19:38:00.001-05:00

This interview scares me but it doesn't surprise me. That liberal indoctrination of youth in many public school classrooms and through varied media platforms (movies, TV, Internet) should not be a surprise to anyone. I once read that most adults don't stray too far from the political views they held prior to the age of 20. Similar to many religious organizations, the statists realize that if you get them young they will likely hold onto those beliefs.

In the interview below Jack Chambless, an economics professor from Valencia College in Florida, tells of an assignment he gave his students on the first day of class. He asked them to write an essay on what the American Dream meant to them and what they expected from government to help them realize the American Dream. He said only 10% said they wanted the federal government to stay out of their lives as much as possible. 80% said they wanted the federal government to pay for their education, find them a job, help them buy a house, and give them money in retirement. Professor Chambless suggests that his students are simply parroting back what they have been indoctrinated to say from their years in public schools.

As I said, this interview scares me because I suspect Professor Chambless is correct.

FYI: Here is a link to an article from The Blaze about a teacher handing out a flyer that promoted communism as a being superior to capitalism.

Speak with Conviction

2012-01-23T19:00:00.000-05:00

This video of a Taylor Mali poem makes a very good point about how today's youth's lack of conviction is evident in their way of speaking.

Why Inequality is Not Necessarily Bad

2011-10-29T22:06:00.000-04:00

In this video Law Professor Richard Epstein explains why inequality is good. While his argument is solid, I wouldn't have stated it that way. I would have said liberty is good and you can't have liberty without allowing for economic inequality as a possible outcome. However, when those with economic power extract economic rent from government through bailouts and other special rights then it is bad. But the solution is not to give government more power as many of the OWS crowd want but to limit the scope of government so it is not economically beneficial to lobby for corporate and union handouts. We need to end privatized profits and socialized loses. If a company or a union (GM, Chrysler, UAW, NEA, Bank of America, and so forth) makes bad decisions then they need to pay the price, not taxpayers. Corporatism, not capitalism, is what people should be upset against.

Watch Does U.S. Economic Inequality Have a Good Side? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Is the US a Democracy or a Constitutional Republic?

2011-09-08T21:26:00.001-04:00

When I was a young boy a visiting relative asked me if the US was a democracy or a republic. I said democracy. The led to a 30 minute lecture on why we are a constitutional republic. She was correct, of course. The founders never intended for the US to be a democracy. They feared democracy because a true democracy does not have safeguards to protect liberty. Here is a well done video from the Bill of Rights Institute.

Atlas Shrugged Movie Part 1 DVD Release

2011-09-01T19:08:00.005-04:00

With Atlas Shrugged Part I set for release on November 8, I thought I would share this YouTube review by BookofNick. He does a really good job.

Lyrics to Wilson Getchell's You're Gonna Pay

2011-08-01T05:00:00.005-04:00

You’re Gonna Pay

Old people government funded medication

Subsidized housing in the capital of the nation

3 trillion dollar deficit on top of a 15 trillion dollar debt

Bullet trains, windmills and monkeys on cocaine . . . monkeys on cocaine

Chorus:

You’re gonna pay!

. . . cause someone’s got to . . . pay

For Federally funded cowboy poetry

For Federally funded condoms for pre-teens

For Federally funded books and magazines

And Federally funded air to breathe

(Chorus)

For the 21 Century entitlement state

Where there are crickets in the coffers and pensions to pay

We need less military presence throughout Continental Europe

For more fiscally responsible punk rock music now

(Chorus)

(Repeat Chorus)

For 70 million baby boomers'

Social Security, Social Security

70 million baby boomers'

Social Security, Social Security

(Chorus)

For Federally funded cowboy poetry

For Federally funded condoms for pre-teens

For Federally funded books and magazines

For Federally funded air to breathe

You're Gonna Pay . . . Someone's Got To

2011-07-30T14:36:00.004-04:00

This music video is by Wilson Getchell. The sound reminds me of Greenday or The Ramones but with a ~~conservative~~ fiscally-sound message. I have always been surprised that many young people don't realize that they are the ones who will have to pay for all the government they support and their parents demanded. They will pay through higher taxes and lower living standards. Wake up grasshopper generation! Regardless of what your helicopter mom told you there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

My only criticism of the video is, how can you not include the cost of the two (or is it three?) wars the US is waging? If you want to appeal to an idealistic younger generation, you have to include these misguided and prolonged wars when you talk about wasteful government spending otherwise you look like a shill for the neo-cons. Which is more expensive to the billion millions, monkeys on coke or the kokane guns of Jamdown Town?

Economic Freedom and Quality of Life Video

2011-06-28T18:21:00.001-04:00

The Grasshopper Generation

2011-06-25T15:37:00.030-04:00

As a follow up to my post on Professor Rowley's claim that FDR turned a free people into a "people excessively dependent upon government" and "sowed the seeds for a redistributive, rather than an entrepreneurial society." I present the following statistics from The Economic Collapse Blog as evidence of our dependence on government.

-Over 44 million Americans are on food stamps.

-Over 50 million Americans are now on Medicaid which is one out of every six Americans.

-53 million Americans received $703 billion in Social Security benefits in 2010.

-Right now the U.S. government is either writing or guaranteeing well over 90 percent of all mortgages in the United States.

-Entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare now account for 58% of all U.S. government spending.

- Some experts estimate that the unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government for programs such as Social Security and Medicare are in the neighborhood of 60 trillion dollars. Other experts claim that the total for federal government unfunded liabilities could be well over $100 trillion.

- U.S. households are now actually receiving more money from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes.

Also from The Economic Collapse Blog,

"It really is hard to find the words to describe the true horror of the national debt. The U.S. government has been on the greatest debt binge in all of human history, and a day of reckoning is coming that is going to be so painful that it is going to shock America to the core. We have lived so far above our means for so long that none of us really has any concept of what "normal" is like anymore. The United States has enjoyed the greatest party in the history of the world, but now this decades-old party is ending and the bills are coming due. It was Dick Cheney who famously said that "deficits don't matter". Well, try telling that to the nation of Greece right about now. The horror that Greece is just beginning to experience is a preview of what is going to happen to us as well. Only when it happens to us it is going to be so much worse, because when we go down we are going to bring the entire global financial system down with us.

"What we have done to future generations is beyond sickening. Previous generations entrusted to us the greatest economic machine in the history of the world and we destroyed it. Now we are leaving to our children and our grandchildren an economic future that has been totally wiped out and a national debt of more than 14 trillion dollars that we expect them to repay."

Best Paragraph on FDR I Ever Read

2011-06-25T15:16:00.002-04:00

Most (all?) elementary and secondary school history books present FDR as America's savior who led us out of the Great Depression. Most historians consider him one of the greatest presidents. Charles Rowley - a former economics professor of mine - has managed to set the record straight in only one paragraph.

“Despite the existence of a financial panic, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected into office by Americans who retained a remarkable independence of spirit and willingness to make their own way in life that had been the great legacy of the Founders and of all those freedom-seeking immigrants who had abandoned all they had to seek opportunity in the New World. By his actions while in extended office, FDR transformed a minor Panic into a Great Depression, and sowed the seeds of a progressive socialism that slowly would throttle all enterprise out of the capitalist system. By his pandering to the fears of the weakest remnants, and by his specious use of words of insincere comfort to those who had no desire to flourish as free individuals, FDR weakened the constitution of the People, made the People excessively dependent upon governmment, and sowed the seeds for a redistributive, rather than an entrepreneurial society. FDR was not only a traitor to his class. He was a singularly ill-informed and vacuous traitor to his nation.” Charles K. Rowley, June 25, 2011

The Morality of Profit

2011-05-18T04:07:00.000-04:00

A great video from the Atlas Network.

Some Comments on Atlas Shrugged Part I

2011-04-17T20:08:00.001-04:00

This is not a review of Atlas Shrugged Part I. I am simply too emotionally connected to the book to review the movie fairly. While it has been 30 years since I have read Atlas Shrugged (yes, I have purposefully avoided re-reading it for fear it wasn’t as great as I remember), its impact on my world view was so profound that no movie could live up to the book. While I have cast aside much of Rand’s Objectivist philosophy and whole heartedly accepted Christ as the objective measure of morality, my political views continue to be guided by Atlas Shrugged. Sure I was just an impressionable teenager growing up on a farm outside of Knoxville, Tennessee when I read Atlas Shrugged, but it inspired me like nothing else had before. While Atlas Shrugged did not start my journey to libertarianism (reading Restoring the American Dream by Robert Ringer as a high school freshman did), it sealed the deal. I have viewed politicians – from both parties – with suspicion ever since.

For me this is very similar to when the first Narnia book was made into a movie, I had to see it on opening day. And I actually care that it makes a lot of money for reasons more than just because there will be sequels. Strange I know. I am no longer a middle school kid who cares if a song from my favorite band is in the Top 40 Countdown but it feels similar somehow. Of course, there are differences between the two movies. Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had a $180 million production budget and a $60 million advertising budget and was made by an established movie production company and distributed and promoted by Disney. Atlas Shrugged Part I was made on a shoestring budget (by Hollywood standards) of $10 million. Narnia opened in thousands of theaters. Atlas Shrugged Part I opened on fewer than 300 screens. And many of the theaters who showed it on opening weekend only show independent movies or are considered second tier theaters. I saw it at a theater that decided to show it at the last minute due to all the calls they received asking for it. (Thank you Regal Downtown West.) Other than on the Internet, I have seen no advertisements, trailers or any other promotions for the movie. Mostly it has been promoted by a few conservative talk shows.

Given that the movie was rushed into production and filming reportedly was completed in only six weeks, I was afraid the movie would be underwhelming at best and embarrassingly bad at worst. Well, I am happy to report that I enjoyed it. While a few scenes would have benefitted from a few more retakes, the made-for-TV look early on disappears as the story takes over. My biggest disappointment was that it was only 102 minutes and it even seems shorter because it is such a good ride. I look forward to talking to people who have not read the book to get their reaction.

Go see it so the producers can make Part II and Part III.

Is the Atlas Shrugged Movie Suitable for Children? A Review

2011-04-15T22:21:00.004-04:00

Just back from seeing Atlas Shrugged Part 1 and, as promised, I am going to attempt to “review” it from the perspective of a couple of my favorite sites that review movies for content and appropriateness for children. I hope Kids-in-Mind.com and PluggedIn.com will review the movie; they will do a more thorough review. But until then, here is my review for appropriateness.

First, it is a PG-13 movie so for parents who absolutely refuse to take any child under 13 to a PG-13 movie, this movie is not for you. However, if you are a parent who allows your 11 or 12 year old to watch PG-13 movies or even watch many prime time TV shows, this movie is probably acceptable.

So how does it rate on violence, profanity and sexual content?

Violence: Virtually no physical violence. I am guessing Kids-in-Mind.com would probably give it a 2 on a 10 scale for violence. Of course there is violence against the entrepreneurs by the looters who use the power of government to take their property.

Profanity: Some mild obscenities. While I didn’t count the instances of profanity, I am guessing there were fewer than ten instances. Kids-in-Mind would probably give a 3 on a 10 scale for profanity.

Sexual content: No nudity though there are two bed scenes, both involving Hank Rearden. The scene with his wife ends humorously. The scene with Dagny is more passionate. Kids-in-Mind would probably give it a 6 of a 10 scale for sexual content.

Spiritual content: There is no religious content to speak of which might surprise some given that Ayn Rand was a vocal atheist.

In the next couple of days I hope to post a few more observations about the movie.

Edit: PluggedIn.com's review

Is the Atlas Shrugged Movie suitable for children?

2011-04-12T18:28:00.001-04:00

I have tickets to see Atlas Shrugged Part 1 on Friday, April 15. My review will be posted either late Friday or early Saturday. The movie is rated PG-13 for “some sexuality” so it probably is not going to be appropriate for younger children but, of course, parents need to make that decision for their own children. I have walked out on PG movies with my children (and demanded a refund) and I have been okay with some PG-13 movies. Since my children are in middle school it is especially critical that my wife and I be aware of what is an acceptable PG-13 movie and what is not.

In the past I have been assisted by the reviews from PluggedIn.com and Kids-in-Mind.com in helping me decide if a particular movie is appropriate for my children. However, since Atlas Shrugged is an independent release, it will probably not be reviewed by PluggedIn.com or Kids-in-Mind.com for a few weeks, if ever. (I hope I am wrong.) Therefore, I plan on reviewing the movie from the perspective taken by those two well-known movie review sites.

Check back Saturday morning.

4 Reasons Why Big Government is Bad Government

2011-02-08T07:27:00.000-05:00

This video is from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

Answers to the Question: Why We Need Government

2011-01-17T12:33:00.002-05:00

Professor Russ Roberts posts the following at Cafe Hayek:

The U.S. Government Printing Office has a web site to help kids understand our country. There are different sections for different age groups and grades in school. For K-2, here is how the site explains the role of government (HT: Gregory Adams):

Why do we need a government? Imagine what your school would be like if no one was in charge. Each class would make its own rules. Who gets to use the gym if two classes want to use it at the same time? Who would clean the classrooms? Who decides if you learn about Mars or play kickball? Sounds confusing, right?
This is why schools have people who are in charge, such as the principal, administrators, teachers, and staff. Our nation has people who are in charge and they make up the government.

Hmmm. Not quite what I’d say. Feel free to take a shot at a better explanation in the comments. Remember, this is for kids who are between the ages of five and seven years old.

You can follow the link to Cafe Hayek to see some very good answers. I will post the best one or two responses after a few days. I hope Professor Roberts doesn't mind.

EDIT: And the winner is . . .

From JS: You know the bossy little girl in your class? That's right, she's the one who gets angry and throws a fit when you play tag instead of hide-and-seek at recess. You know, the one who haughtily tells you that Big Bird is most certainly NOT green when you choose your favorite crayon during coloring time. And at lunch time, she probably told you that you shouldn't eat a grape jelly sandwich, because strawberry is so much better.

In the grown-up world, children with different abilities get different jobs. A strong, brave boy might grow up to be a fire fighter. A girl who loves to read might grow up to write books herself. And the little, bossy girl will grow up to work for the government. The purpose of government is so that when she grows up, she can get her way all the time.

George Ought to Help

2010-12-20T19:20:00.005-05:00

While you might think George "ought" to help his friend, is it moral to force him to help?

Happy Bill of Rights Day

2010-12-15T04:35:00.003-05:00

On December 15, 1791, the U.S. Constitution was amended to include the Bill of Rights. George Mason, a delegate from Virginia, had refused to vote for the Constitution at the Philadelphia convention because it did not include a bill of rights. Afterwards, he and his fellow Anti-Federalists fought against ratification of the Constitution unless a bill of rights was added. Fearing ratification was going to fail, the Federalists agreed to add a bill of rights once the new government was established.

While the Bill of Rights has not always been able to stop the government from abusing the rights of Americans, it has served at times as a break to slow down the abuses. So for that, thank you Mr. Mason.

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Amendment VII

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Philosophy of Liberty: Property

2010-11-13T12:16:00.000-05:00

This is a very well done video by The Foundation for a Free Society on the philosophical arguments for property rights.

Great New Site for Historical Documents - The Patriot Post

2010-11-07T19:38:00.000-05:00

The Patriot Post has done a yoeman's job in putting together a comprehensive list of historical documents that any student of liberty should have bookmarked.

Here is a list of the Founding Documents:

The Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776)
The Articles of Confederation (November 15, 1777)
The New Jersey Plan (June 15, 1787)
Hamilton’s Plan of Union (June 18, 1787)
Letter Of Transmittal (September 17, 1787)
The Constitution of the United States of America (September 17, 1787)
The Federalist Papers (1787-1788)
The First Ten Amendments as Ratified (1789)
Bill of Rights Preamble (1789)
Madison's Proposal for the Bill of Rights (June 8, 1789)
The Bill of Rights (December 15, 1791)
Amendments 11-27 to the Constitution of the United States (February 7, 1795)

But there is much more than that. Check it out.

Small Government and Free Enterprise Video: Best 10 Minute Explanation Ever

2010-10-08T21:33:00.001-04:00

Camp Politics Video

2010-09-29T19:03:00.000-04:00

This amusing video from The Institute for Justice on a camp to train future politicians.

Bill of Rights Institute Website

2010-09-18T14:51:00.000-04:00

The Bill of Rights Institute has a very educational website. Here is a video that walks through their site.

Happy Constitution Day

2010-09-17T21:47:00.001-04:00

I am guessing many of today's students wouldn't do as well as Barney.

The reason you can't yell "FIRE" in a crowded theater

2010-09-16T08:52:00.007-04:00

I am a little tired of hearing that "you can't yell 'FIRE' in a crowded theater" as an example of where the First Amendment does not apply. A theater is privately owned and the owner CAN limit speech if he so chooses . . . and probably would. Congress, on the other hand, cannot limit speech. Period. But what if it is a government-owned theater? Government-owned theaters are not authorized by the Constitution and, therefore, are unconstitutional. See how easy that is. Who needs a law degree? But I am not a Supreme Court Justice, apparently this is how a Supreme Court Justice thinks:

Young Americans for Liberty Promo featuring Erica Goldson

2010-09-11T12:08:00.001-04:00

You can check out Erica's blog and follow her on Facebook.

I hope these people don't vote

2010-09-09T23:09:00.001-04:00

Apparently 22% of those responding to a CNN poll on whether the Florida pastor has the First Amendment right to burn the Quran should not ever vote. To be blunt, they are ignorant. The First Amendment protects unpopular speech. While I am not supportive of this guy's publicity stunt, he without question has the right to do it.

Commerce Clause Video

2010-08-26T19:58:00.000-04:00

I have posted a lot of very good videos but this one is a must watch. Reason TV talks to two law professors - one an originalist and the other a statist - to explain their positions on the applicability of the US Constitution's Commerce Clause. It is this clause that allowed the camel to get its nose into the tent and its broad interpretation has allowed the entire Constitution to be subverted.

Thomas Jefferson and Logic

2010-08-21T21:11:00.001-04:00

Too often political discourse today is nothing more than a string of political talking points which are themselves nothing more than political catch phrases. But that wasn't always the case, many of the founders were well versed in logic. John Rappoport lays out the logical arguments Jefferson made in the Declaration of Independence. Go read how the Declaration of Independence uses logic to make the case for independence and liberty.

"I point this out to show that the Founders were not only acquainted with the use of logic, they wanted to make their great case for freedom and independence by using its power.

"In their minds, freedom and logic were connected.

If in our schools, in 2010, logic as a distinct subject has been reduced to paltry terms, how are students able to grasp the majestic nature of freedom, as expressed in the Declaration? How are they able to understand that living in freedom is more than vaguely drifting from one slogan to another, one addled piece of political rhetoric to another?"

Objectivist Toddler

2010-08-15T21:14:00.002-04:00

I laughed out loud at this story . . .

When little Aiden toddled up our daughter Johanna and asked to play with her Elmo ball, he was, admittedly, very sweet and polite. I think his exact words were, "Have a ball, peas [sic]?" And I'm sure you were very proud of him for using his manners.

To be sure, I was equally proud when Johanna yelled, "No! Looter!" right in his looter face, and then only marginally less proud when she sort of shoved him.
The thing is, in this family we take the philosophies of Ayn Rand seriously. We conspicuously reward ourselves for our own hard work, we never give to charity, and we only pay our taxes very, very begrudgingly.
Since the day Johanna was born, we've worked to indoctrinate her into the truth of Objectivism. Every night we read to her from the illustrated, unabridged edition of Atlas Shrugged--glossing over all the hardcore sex parts, mind you, but dwelling pretty thoroughly on the stuff about being proud of what you've earned and not letting James Taggart-types bring you down. For a long time we were convinced that our efforts to free her mind were for naught, but recently, as we've started socializing her a little bit, we've been delighted to find that she is completely antipathetic to the concept of sharing. As parents, we couldn't have asked for a better daughter.

That's why, when Johanna then began berating your son, accusing him of trying to coerce from her a moral sanction of his theft of the fruit of her labor, in as many words, I kind of egged her on. Even when Aiden started crying.

Read the rest

Success by Berton Braley

2010-08-03T20:08:00.003-04:00

If you want a thing bad enough To go out and fight for it...

If you want a thing bad enough
To go out and fight for it,
Work day and night for it,
Give up your time and your peace and your sleep for it

If only desire of it
Makes you quite mad enough
Never to tire of it,
Makes you hold all other things tawdry and cheap for it

If life seems all empty and useless without it
And all that you scheme and you dream is about it,

If gladly you'll sweat for it,
Fret for it, Plan for it,
Lose all your terror of God or man for it,

If you'll simply go after that thing that you want.
With all your capacity,
Strength and sagacity,
Faith, hope and confidence, stern pertinacity,

If neither cold poverty, famished and gaunt,
Nor sickness nor pain
Of body or brain
Can turn you away from the thing that you want,

If dogged and grim you besiege and beset it,
You'll get it!

HT: Capitalism Magazine

Opportunity

2010-08-03T05:01:00.000-04:00

With doubt and dismay your are smitten
You think there’s no chance for you, son?
Why, the best books haven’t been written
The best race hasn’t been run,
The best score hasn’t been made yet,
The best song hasn’t been sung,
The best tune hasn’t been played yet,
Cheer up, for the world is young!

No chance? Why the world is just eager
For things that you ought to create.
Its store of true wealth is still meager
Its needs are incessant and great,
It yearns for more power and beauty
More laughter and love and romance,
More loyalty, labor and duty,
No chance–why there’s nothing but chance!

For the best verse hasn’t been rhymed yet,
The best house hasn’t been planned,
The highest peak hasn’t been climbed yet,
The mightiest rivers aren’t spanned,
Don’t worry and fret, faint hearted,
The chances have just begun,
For the Best jobs haven’t been started,
The Best work hasn’t been done.

-Berton Braley

HT: RationalMind

Quotes from the Framers of the Constitution and Others

2010-07-22T17:10:00.000-04:00

Economist Walter Williams has a really nice page of quotes from the framers of the Constitution and others.

Here is an example:

"Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
-- John Adams, letter to John Taylor, April 15, 1814

Minnema in 2044

2010-07-13T05:32:00.005-04:00

Devon Minnema is a 14 year old tea party organizer who is very well spoken and, based on this brief interview, I would say well read. However, I will confess that I normally have a negative reaction when kids proclaim they want to be president. Therefore I would have liked for him to have ended the interview by saying he has no interest in running for president in the future but instead would like to do something more productive like becoming an entrepreneur or an engineer or maybe even a professional wrestler.

He said that some of his government school teachers were not so receptive to the ideas of liberty but he explained his Young Americans for Liberty group were about "Peace, prosperity and freedom. How can you argue with that?" Good answer but I am surprised that that silenced the typical lefty teacher.

Not a Real Political Ad . . . It is Too Honest

2010-06-25T22:57:00.001-04:00

Fatherly Advice

2010-06-20T06:55:00.008-04:00

The Frugal Dad has some good advice for his son. It is too good not to share. The post is actually longer, but here is the main points of the advice:

"My son, there are so many things left for me to teach you about the real world. Much more than I could write in a single letter. But above all else, remember that no one owes you a thing. You are responsible for taking care of yourself, and one day, your own family.

You will be tested, by our culture, by our government, by bad examples, and by a lazy streak that attempts to attach itself to all of us at some point in our lives. You must ignore these influences, and remember that your goal is to grow to be as self-reliant as possible.

Here’s a few things to keep in mind as you grow older:

Do not depend on government for your well-being. In an emergency, don’t be too proud to accept help, but do not make it a way of life.

Do not depend on banks for financial security. The best credit line available is the one attached to your emergency savings fund. Remember, the borrower is slave to the lender, and you don’t want to be a slave to big banks. Take my word for it!

Do not depend on schools to provide 100% of your education. You must self-educate beyond the lessons taught in school. Challenge your educators, and challenge your own thoughts. Read books. Read books contrary to your own opinion, so that you may learn another point of view. Read books on subjects you don’t think you care about and you just may discover your passion.

There’s no such thing as get rich quick. Building wealth takes time, and a lot of hard work. If you want to be successful in anything, you must work at it for hours every day – sometimes late into the night, and early in the morning. If you are happy with mediocrity, punch the clock after 8 hours, plop down in front of a television and waste valuable time until you fall asleep. Repeat this process until the weekends when you can do even more of the same.

Be skeptical. Don’t believe anything you read, most things you hear, and even a few things you see with your own eyes. Question everything. Nothing in life is black and white.

Choose your spouse carefully – it is the most important decision you will ever make. Love has a way of robbing us of our intellect, and in many cases leads to irrational decisions based solely on emotions. Choosing someone to spend the rest of your life with is far too important for that. Look for someone that shares your hopes and dreams. Someone who is ambitious, but not too much. Someone who has the same values and beliefs as you do. Like you’ve heard your dad say before, opposites do attract, but they rarely stay together forever.

Democracy and Ethics of Force Video

2010-05-04T19:54:00.000-04:00

This video is not as well done as The Philosophy of Liberty video, but it is worth watching.

Is Washington Bankrupting America?

2010-04-29T20:06:00.000-04:00

This video is from www.BankruptingAmerica.org

Music Video: Too Late to Apologize

2010-04-27T18:58:00.000-04:00

A history lesson music video. It was just okay for me.

http://www.popmodal.com/video/5114/Music-Video-Too-Late-to-Apologize-A-Declaration-of-Independence

Halfway across the globe
And we're standing on new ground
Screaming 'cross the waves
You can't hear a sound
There's no fair trials, no trade, no liberties
No tea
We've colonized America; we won't stand for tyranny,
Oh king
And it's too late to apologize
It's too late
We've paid your foolish tax, read the acts
And they just won't do
We want to make it clear, we believe this much is true
All men were created with certain
Unalienable rights
Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit
Of happines

The Original Hide The Decline Video

2010-04-24T12:57:00.000-04:00

YouTube had taken down the original "Hide the Decline" global warming satire video, but it is back up . . for now.

Hide the Decline

2010-04-23T22:10:00.003-04:00

We don't need no PUBLIC education

2010-03-24T04:36:00.003-04:00

Hey! Public school teachers . . . leave those kids alone!

HT: A Quaint Life

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!

2010-03-23T18:57:00.004-04:00

Today is the 235th anniversary of Patrick Henry's famous Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death speech before a meeting of the colony's delegates held in St. John's church in Richmond.

"It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace-- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

- Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775

In honor of Patrick Henry, I encourage you to join the peaceful fight to reclaim our God-given liberties. Your brothers (and sisters) in liberty are already in the streets protesting the government's power grab. Will you join them or continue to sit on your couch talking back to the TV?

How a Bill Really Becomes a Law

2010-03-23T04:45:00.000-04:00

The old Schoolhouse Rock video "How a Bill Becomes a Law" is educational and totally appropriate for elementary school age children. However, cynical middle schoolers are ready for the ugly truth of politics.

and the original -

The End?

2010-03-22T07:51:00.001-04:00

Essay Contest on Ayn Rand's Anthem

2010-03-15T22:18:00.001-04:00

The Ayn Rand Institute has an annual essay contest for 8th, 9th and 10th graders on Rand's novel Anthem. The winner gets $2,000 but 235 runner ups will receive some level of cash award.

Select ONE of the following three topics:

Why do you think the Council of Vocations assigns Equality the job of Street Sweeper? Is it due to error, incompetence or a more sinister motivation? Explain.
The old locks and lack of guards in the Palace of Corrective Detention indicate that prisoners never try to escape. Why do you think they do not? Explain.
In a single, unified essay, explain the meaning and wider significance of EACH of the following quotes in the story:
1. “To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.” (Ch. 12)
2. “It is the mind which thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth.” (Ch. 11)
3. “And we thought that we could trust this being who looked upon us from the stream, and that we had nothing to fear with this being.” (Ch. 8)

The Great Lie of the Nanny State

2010-03-15T22:07:00.003-04:00

Visualize Fake Budget Cuts

2010-03-14T17:42:00.003-04:00

Making fun of Obama's fake budget cuts is apparently like shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone is getting in on the act. See more here.

Cutting Government Spending Cartoon

2010-03-12T17:55:00.000-05:00

Music Video: Liberty

2010-03-03T22:33:00.003-05:00

"They keep telling me it is a sin to be free

and that is more than I am willing to stand."

Jordan Page

How many songs do you know that rhyme hyper inflation with bad legislation?

Video: The Importance of Profit

2010-03-01T18:30:00.000-05:00

Is profit necessary or is it the reason products are so expensive? In this video on The Importance of Profit from the "purveyor and causer of awesome" Sean Malone, a proper understanding of profit is explained. So next time someone says the word "profit" with contempt in their voice, maybe you can enlighten them as to the role profits play in seeing that the products they like get produced.

Jerry Seinfeld on Parenting and the Three Poison Ps

2010-02-14T18:42:00.011-05:00

In this Sunday's Parade magazine, comedian Jerry Seinfeld gives some pretty good parenting advice and one excellent observation on why parents make a common mistake. He calls his rules of parenting "the poison Ps." The first P is for too much praise. Parents today tend to over praise their children. Kids are not stupid, they realize they don't deserve praise all the time and that not everyone on the team deserves a trophy. The second poisonous P is for problem solving. Today's helicopter parents are all too ready to jump in with a solution to a problem without letting a child find the solution himself. Jerry thinks this is stunting their ability to develop effective problem solving skills. I have observed children who just wait for their parents to tell them what to do instead of attempting to fix a problem on their own. The third P is for giving your child too much pleasure. Parents constantly give their children stuff. They are unwilling to say "no" to most requests. Does a 4th grader really need a cell phone?

This last P leads to Jerry's observation on why today's parents spoil their children. He says, "We feel so guilty for destroying their innocence - which is what we did - so we're now trying to repair that by creating perfect childhoods for our children." So parents attempt to buy that perfect childhood with stuff. Buying stuff is so much easier than actually being a good parent. A good parent knows that delaying gratification teaches a valuable lesson, that is, stuff is only possible and satisfying through hard work.

I probably shouldn't make this post about politics, but I have to wonder if one reason politicians try to "give" voters unlimited goodies is because they feel guilty for destroying our country? Just like with today's parents, today's politicians are trying to create the "perfect" society and, in the process, are creating many messed up voters. Voters have come to expect government will solve their every problem. And it does not matter if the cost is passed down to future generations. Parents today should be ashamed of what they have done to their children by ignoring timeless principles such as hard work and delayed gratification and trying to create an illusion of a perfect childhood or society without sacrifice.

“The problem with trying to child-proof the world, is that it makes people neglect the far more important task of world-proofing the child.” Hugh Daniel

Groucho Marx Quote on Politics

2010-02-04T07:51:00.001-05:00

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies” -- comedian Groucho Marx

Freedom Channel

2010-01-30T23:13:00.005-05:00

I just stumbled upon a blog called Freedom Channel where you will find a collection of great pro-liberty/anti-statist videos. There are videos with Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, Ron Paul, Walter Williams, John Stossel, and others. I suggest you check out the Freedom Channel.

Fear the Boom and Bust - an Economics Rap Video

2010-01-26T10:21:00.012-05:00

When I first heard about this video, I thought it was going to be really lame. I imagined it was going to be like a bad Saturday Night Live skit where uncool white people try to look cool by rapping. It isn't as bad as I imagined. It is actually quite good. But what do I know, I am an uncool white person.

In Fear the Boom and Bust, two famous economists from the Great Depression years - John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek - come back to life to attend an economics conference on the current economic crisis. Before the conference begins, and at the insistence of Keynes, they go out for a night on the town and rap about why there's a "boom and bust" cycle in modern economies and good reason to fear it.

Peace out

Addendum: Professor Roberts has developed a lesson plan for teachers. For instructions on how to get the lesson plan, click here.

The Constitution and Freedom- Judge Andrew Napolitano

2010-01-14T07:26:00.001-05:00

Critical Thinking Lesson

2010-01-05T07:50:00.001-05:00

L4K Best of 2009 - Lemonade Stand Chronicles

2009-12-31T11:04:00.007-05:00

By far the most popular posts - based on emails - have been the five Lemonade Stand stories. If you missed them the first time, you can read them all here:

http://liberty4kids.blogspot.com/search/label/lemonade%20stand

The Nanny State, Debt and Your Children

2009-12-15T21:58:00.000-05:00

Political Paternalism and Tyranny

2009-12-15T18:28:00.000-05:00

"Unless those who love liberty stop it, the radical ideological belief in political paternalism and the welfare state may leave nothing but tyranny and poverty for generations to come."

To read Professor Ebeling's article, click here.

Letting Be Video

2009-12-13T19:32:00.002-05:00

This video is an entry to The Fraser Institute's Student Video Contest. It asks the question, What is the role of government in the economy?

Hat Tip: Michael Nystrom

Give the Gift of a Libertarian Children's Book

2009-12-10T21:03:00.003-05:00

While not an exhaustive list by any measure, these are some of my favorite children books with libertarian themes. I have only included books that I have read.

Please add any recommendations to the comments section.

Pre-school

Little Red Hen

The Three Little Pigs

The Ant and the Grasshopper

The Emperor's New Clothes

Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss

Thidwick the Big-hearted Moose by Dr. Seuss

Grades 1 – 3

They can read the above books or read to them the Little House and Narnia books.

An Island Called Liberty by Joseph Specht

Grades 4 – 5

Little House Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Little House: The Rose Years by Roger Lea MacBride

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

Grades 6 – 8

The Shadow Children Series by Margaret Peterson Haddix (okay for some 4^th and 5^th graders)

High School

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell

Pass the Debt Burden

2009-12-05T00:42:00.001-05:00

Terry Paulson writes, "It took nearly 150 years for Congress to pass a resolution apologizing for slavery. We should apologize now to future generations for what we’ve done and are doing to America. Though our generation’s motivation was compassionate, we’re leaving America worse.

. . .

"Unfortunately, since we keep adding more entitlements and refuse to pay as we go, we leave no inheritance of opportunity, just a horrendous, out-of-control debt. Our current deficit is over $12 trillion, but that’s just what politicians will admit. Former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker estimates the total “unfunded liabilities” at $56.4 trillion. That’s the bill to pay off the publicly held portion of the national debt and all the benefits already promised through Social Security, Medicare and other welfare programs minus what will be collected for these programs under existing tax laws.

. . .

"Like Boy Scouts who work to leave the wilderness better than they found it, every generation should leave America better for having lived. Leaving future generations the bill for our excesses doesn’t leave a legacy we can be proud of!"

The House That Uncle Sam Built

2009-12-04T21:17:00.000-05:00

"The man who parties like there is no tomorrow puts his body through an “up” and a “down” course that looks a lot like the business cycle. At the party, the man freely imbibes. He has a great time before stumbling home at 2:00 a.m., where he crashes on the sofa. A few hours later, he awakens in the grip of the dreaded hangover. He then has a choice to make: get a short-term lift from another drink or sober up. If he chooses the latter and endures a few hours of discomfort, he can recover. In any event, no one would say the hangover is when the harm is done; the harm was done the night before and the hangover is the evidence." - from The House That Uncle Sam Built by Steve Horwitz and Pete Boettke

To read the story of what caused the housing bubble that led to the economic collapse of 2008, go here.

Government Project Management Graphic

2009-12-02T21:11:00.000-05:00

HT: LibertarianChristians.com

Teaching Economics by Running a Coffee Shop

2009-11-25T09:00:00.004-05:00

My children recently showed me an online game called Coffee Shop. The game can be found at a site called Cool Math Games.

In the game, you are giving seed money to buy supplies (coffee, cups, sugar, and milk). You then must come up with a recipe - strong or weak coffee, how much sugar, and how creamy. And finally, you set the price (but you soon learn that the price is set by supply and demand). You get feedback from customers and you adjust your price and recipe accordingly. The demand for coffee is affected by the temperture and, just like in real life, the temperture changes over the 14 days you operate the coffee stand. At the end of everyday you have to reorder supplies and adjust your recipe.

This is a wonderful game for teaching economics to children and it is appropriate for chidren of all ages.

There is also a similar game based on running a lemonade stand.

The Problem with Johnny

2009-11-24T23:11:00.002-05:00

“The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.” - Thomas Sowell

Why do libertarians like the Little House books so much?

2009-11-23T16:46:00.005-05:00

Why do libertarians like the Little House books so much? Well, yes, Laura Ingalls Wilder was the mother of Rose Wilder Lane who wrote one of the great libertarian books, The Discovery of Freedom, but, in the end, it is about the story and the message.

Here is what Robert Thornton said in an article originally published in The Freeman in 1972"

"These books can help us recapture the spirit of the pilgrims, patriots, and pioneers who founded this nation and made it great. Part of that spirit is the taste for independence and a sense of individual responsibility.
Laura's family didn't expect anyone else to take care of them. They took care of themselves and recognized that having freedom means the freedom to fail as well as to succeed. Another part of this great spirit is not to bemoan one's fate or complain about not getting one's "fair share" of the world's goods. Another, is a sense of community where so much is accomplished on a voluntary basis, everyone pitching in to contribute whatever he can in time, talent, and money."

Go read Robert Thornton's complete review at Mises.

An Inconvenient Presentation

2009-11-19T05:29:00.003-05:00

The Climate Skeptic has a presentation for anyone interested in hearing the other side of the global warming "debate." I put debate in parenthesis because the other side refuses to debate the issue. They prefer to claim the science is settled and, therefore, they see no reason to debate. For the more open minded . . .

A pdf file of the presentation is here (2.7MB): Download pdf

A Google docs version of the presentation: Climate Presentation, online viewer

Addendum: This just in . . . global warming scientists (advocates?) have been cherry picking the data.

Unionism vs Volunteerism (or SEIU vs Eagle Scout)

2009-11-16T11:36:00.007-05:00

So you are a hard working, conscientious teen who saw a need not being filled and decided to do something for your community. You know, the way things used to get done before everyone looked to the government for everything. This story is appalling.

In pursuit of an Eagle Scout badge, Kevin Anderson, 17, has toiled for more than 200 hours hours over several weeks to clear a walking path in an east Allentown park.

Little did the do-gooder know that his altruistic act would put him in the cross hairs of the city's largest municipal union.

Nick Balzano, president of the local Service Employees International Union, told Allentown City Council Tuesday that the union is considering filing a grievance against the city for allowing Anderson to clear a 1,000-foot walking and biking path at Kimmets Lock Park.

"We'll be looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails," Balzano told the council.

Balzano said Saturday he isn't targeting Boy Scouts. But given the city's decision in July to lay off 39 SEIU members, Balzano said "there's to be no volunteers." No one except union members may pick up a hoe or shovel, plant a flower or clear a walking path.

Hat tip: Hugh

Dow's Up, Kids - No More Worries!

2009-11-07T08:11:00.001-05:00

Trick or Treat?

2009-10-31T23:45:00.008-04:00

The L4K Lemonade Stand Chronicles:

Trick or Treat?

“Trick or treat, trick or treat,” Little Timmy was yelling as he skipped down the sidewalk. (Yes, Little Timmy skipped. Surprised?)

“Will you shut up!” demanded Barry.

Barry and Timmy were making plans for Halloween. It was always a day the boys looked forward to. They had closed the lemonade stand a month earlier so they now had more time for other activities. And nothing was more fun than pretending to be someone else and getting free candy.

But who would they be this year? And who would give the best candy and who would get their windows soaped or their trees TPed?

Timmy always liked pretending to be an economist. He had dressed up like an old English economist named John Maynard Keynes for the past three years. He also liked John Kenneth Galbraith. Barry always made fun of him for dressing like two “free market” economists. He had suggested a few more "progressive" economists to Timmy but Timmy’s dad wouldn’t allow him to dress like those guys. He had said something about no one would know Larry, Moe, and Curly these days. Barry hadn’t decided who he would be this year. He was toying with dressing up like Two Face, The Riddler, or pretending to be professional basketball player.

As the boys ran to meet up with the gang, Timmy suddenly took a detour around the old theater. Barry yelled at him to stop, but it took a block before he did.

“What is wrong?” Barry asked.

"I don’t like walking by the theater with that poster out front," Timmy confided.

“What poster? Oh, you mean the poster of that old horror movie It’s Alive!” said Barry.

“Yes,” Timmy said, “it gives me the creeps . . . what with that claw sticking out from the baby carriage.”

“It is just a movie, you chicken,” said Barry, “I have an idea. The only thing you have to fear is fear itself . . . or something like that. Let’s sneak in to the movie. You won’t be afraid when you see how cheesy it is.”

“I don’t know, Barry, the last time I saw a really scary movie I wet my pants,” admitted Timmy. But he trusted Barry so he went along.

They mistakenly sneaked into theater number two where a public announcement was being shown live. As they set down a very scary woman came on to make an announcement. She announced that the government would be making all the decisions now. She said with delight, “When health care is controlled by us, we will have the justification to do WHATEVER we want because health is an even bigger ace card than that stupid commerce clause we have been relying upon for years as justification for ignoring the Constitutional limits on governmental power. Food, manufacturing, pre-natal testing, end of life, it all will fall under our control."

She laughed as zombies stood behind her nodding in agreement as if they were under some mind control. Timmy became scared and, well, let’s just say he ran home to change.

Barry got excited too. So excited and so hopeful that he too had to run home too. As he ran home he kept yelling, “It’s alive, it’s alive!”

Post Script

I hope no children got too scared reading this story. It is after all just a story. Isn’t it?

Fox News is Biased

2009-10-30T21:40:00.002-04:00

There has been a lot of blog chatter about President Obama’s “attack” on Fox News. Is this the first battle in a long war against news outlets not supportive of the direction he wants to take the county? I don’t know. He may have just simply been blowing off steam as some Fox commentators, such as Glenn Beck, have been especially aggressive and effective in exposing the hard-left agenda of his administration. Or he may be playing to his base of Fox-hating, Kos-loving fringe to draw attention away from his failure to get us out of Bush’s wars and to push though nationalized health care. For the record, I am suspicious of Fox because many of these same commentators were cheerleaders when the Bush Administration was expanding government and getting us involved in a misguided war.

But what is being missed in all this is the undisputed fact that all news outlets (newspapers, TV, magazines, radio, blogs) are biased. Even those news outlets that attempt to be unbiased in their reporting are nevertheless biased in their selection of stories and selection of experts. How could it be otherwise? The decision of what to cover is made by individuals. News stories are written by individuals. These individuals have biases. What these individuals consider important necessarily biases which stories get reported on, which experts get quoted, and which data are accepted. Reporters are rarely experts in anything other than maybe writing.

So yes, Fox is biased. But so too is CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, and well, you get the point.

Is Health Care a Right? Ron Paul vs Michael Moore

2009-10-30T05:43:00.001-04:00

"You have a right to live and the right to liberty . . . but you don't have a right to someone else's services."

One-letter Proof that the Science is NOT Settled on Global Warming

2009-10-29T20:20:00.001-04:00

"It has been often said that the "science is settled" on the issue of CO2 and climate. Let me put this claim to rest with a simple one-letter proof that it is false." Professor Howard Hayden

Read the one-letter proof from physicist Howard Hayden here.

Simpsons Fountainhead

2009-10-08T22:33:00.001-04:00

Sometimes we parents preach one thing but teach something else by our example. This video teaches a very important lesson to parents. Stay tuned until the end.

And here is Roark's speech from the movie:

Don't Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford (SNL Video)

2009-10-07T12:45:00.004-04:00

This is one of the all time great Saturday Night Live skits.

Liberalism Used to Mean Freedom

2009-10-07T11:19:00.001-04:00

"We now know that people do propel themselves along the road to serfdom by majority vote, and we see that those who have voted themselves into slavery are just as much slaves as those who have been put in bondage by a conqueror. Power is power, whether sanctioned by divine right or authorized by the popular will. Power is not liberty; liberty operates in another dimension and has other requirements. As soon as a significant number of people become aware of these requirements, Liberalism will again mean freedom." Edmund Opitz in The Freeman, December 1975

HT: LCC

Frederick Douglass on Slavery & the US Constitution

2009-10-02T05:20:00.001-04:00

To follow up the seven part Sobran article on the Constitution and to those who continue to dismiss the genius of The Founders because they did not outlaw slavery, here is what Fredrick Douglass had to say:

“Let me tell you something. Do you know that you have been deceived and cheated? You have been told that this government was intended from the beginning for white men, and for white men exclusively; that the men who formed the Union and framed the Constitution designed the permanent exclusion of the colored people from the benefits of those institutions. Davis, Taney and Yancey, traitors at the south, have propagated this statement, while their copperhead echoes at the north have repeated the same. There never was a bolder or more wicked perversion of the truth of history. So far from this purpose was the mind and heart of your fathers, that they desired and expected the abolition of slavery. They framed the Constitution plainly with a view to the speedy downfall of slavery. They carefully excluded from the Constitution any and every word which could lead to the belief that they meant it for persons of only one complexion.
"The Constitution, in its language and in its spirit, welcomes the black man to all the rights which it was intended to guarantee to any class of the American people. Its preamble tells us for whom and for what it was made.”

Frederick Douglass (June 1863)

HT: DP

Constitutional Counter Revolution

2009-09-27T05:49:00.002-04:00

How Tyranny Came to America

by Joseph Sobran

http://www.sobran.com/articles/tyranny.shtml

Part 7

Constitutional Counter Revolution

Well, I don’t have to tell you that this way of thinking is absolutely alien to that of today’s politicians and pundits. Can you imagine Al Gore, Dan Rostenkowski, or Tom Brokaw having a conversation about political principles with any of the Founding Fathers? If you can, you must have a vivid fantasy life.

And the result of the loss of our original political idiom has been, as I say, to invert the original presumptions. The average American, whether he has had high-school civics or a degree in political science, is apt to assume that the Constitution somehow empowers the government to do nearly anything, while implicitly limiting our rights by listing them. Not that anyone would say it this way. But it’s as if the Bill of Rights had said that the enumeration of the federal government’s powers in the Constitution is not meant to deny or disparage any other powers it may choose to claim, while the rights not given to the people in the Constitution are reserved to the federal government to give or withhold, and the states may be progressively stripped of their original powers.

What it comes to is that we don’t really have an operative Constitution anymore. The federal government defines its own powers day by day. It’s limited not by the list of its powers in the Constitution, but by whatever it can get away with politically. Just as the president can now send troops abroad to fight without a declaration of war, Congress can pass a national health care program without a constitutional delegation of power. The only restraint left is political opposition.

If you suspect I’m overstating the change from our original principles, I give you the late Justice Hugo Black. In a 1965 case called Griswold v. Connecticut, the Court struck down a law forbidding the sale of contraceptives on grounds that it violated a right of “privacy.” (This supposed right, of course, became the basis for the Court’s even more radical 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, but that’s another story.) Justice Black dissented in the Griswold case on the following ground: “I like my privacy as well as the next [man],” he wrote, “but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision.” What a hopelessly muddled — and really sinister — misconception of the relation between the individual and the state: government has a right to invade our privacy, unless prohibited by the Constitution. You don’t have to share the Court’s twisted view of the right of privacy in order to be shocked that one of its members takes this view of the “right” of government to invade privacy.

It gets crazier. In 1993 the Court handed down one of the most bizarre decisions of all time. For two decades, enemies of legal abortion had been supporting Republican candidates in the hope of filling the Court with appointees who would review Roe v. Wade. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court finally did so. But even with eight Republican appointees on the Court, the result was not what the conservatives had hoped for. The Court reaffirmed Roe.

Its reasoning was amazing. A plurality opinion — a majority of the five-justice majority in the case — admitted that the Court’s previous ruling in Roe might be logically and historically vulnerable. But it held that the paramount consideration was that the Court be consistent, and not appear to be yielding to public pressure, lest it lose the respect of the public. Therefore the Court allowed Roe to stand.

Among many things that might be said about this ruling, the most basic is this: The Court in effect declared itself a third party to the controversy, and then, setting aside the merits of the two principals’ claims, ruled in its own interest! It was as if the referee in a prizefight had declared himself the winner. Cynics had always suspected that the Court did not forget its self-interest in its decisions, but they never expected to hear it say so.

The three justices who signed that opinion evidently didn’t realize what they were saying. A distinguished veteran Court-watcher (who approved of Roe, by the way) told me he had never seen anything like it. The Court was actually telling us that it put its own welfare ahead of the merits of the arguments before it. In its confusion, it was blurting out the truth.

But by then very few Americans could even remember the original constitutional plan. The original plan was as Madison and Tocqueville described it: State government was to be the rule, federal government the exception. The states’ powers were to be “numerous and indefinite,” federal powers “few and defined.” This is a matter not only of history, but of iron logic: the Constitution doesn’t make sense when read any other way. As Madison asked, why bother listing particular federal powers unless unlisted powers are withheld?

The unchecked federal government has not only overflowed its banks; it has even created its own economy. Thanks to its exercise of myriad unwarranted powers, it can claim tens of millions of dependents, at least part of whose income is due to the abuse of the taxing and spending powers for their benefit: government employees, retirees, farmers, contractors, teachers, artists, even soldiers. Large numbers of these people are paid much more than their market value because the taxpayer is forced to subsidize them. By the same token, most taxpayers would instantly be better off if the federal government simply ceased to exist — or if it suddenly returned to its constitutional functions.

Can we restore the Constitution and recover our freedom? I have no doubt that we can. Like all great reforms, it will take an intelligent, determined effort by many people. I don’t want to sow false optimism.

But the time is ripe for a constitutional counterrevolution. Discontent with the ruling system, as the 1992 Perot vote showed, is deep and widespread among several classes of people: Christians, conservatives, gun owners, taxpayers, and simple believers in honest government all have their reasons. The rulers lack legitimacy and don’t believe in their own power strongly enough to defend it.

The beauty of it is that the people don’t have to invent a new system of government in order to get rid of this one. They only have to restore the one described in the Constitution — the system our government already professes to be upholding. Taken seriously, the Constitution would pose a serious threat to our form of government.

And for just that reason, the ruling parties will be finished as soon as the American people rediscover and awaken their dormant Constitution.

Radicals at the Gate

2009-09-26T05:49:00.000-04:00

How Tyranny Came to America

by Joseph Sobran

http://www.sobran.com/articles/tyranny.shtml

Part 6

Radicals at the Gate

In fact the radicals of the early twentieth century despaired of achieving socialism or communism as long as the Constitution remained. They regarded it as the critical obstacle to their plans, and thought a revolution would be necessary to remove it. As The New Republic wrote: “To have a socialist society we must have a new Constitution.” That’s laying it on the line!

Unfortunately, the next generation of collectivists would be less candid in their contempt for the federal system. Once they learned to feign devotion to the Constitution they secretly regarded as obsolete, the laborious formality of amendment would no longer be necessary. They could merely pretend that the Constitution was on their side. After Franklin Roosevelt restaffed the Supreme Court with his compliant cronies, the federal government would be free to make up its own powers as it went along, thanks to the notion that the Constitution was a malleable “living document,” whose central meaning could be changed, and even reversed, by ingenious interpretation.

Roosevelt’s New Deal brought fascist-style central planning to America — what some call the “mixed economy” but Hilaire Belloc called the Servile State — and his highhanded approach to governance soon led to conflict with the Court, which found several of his chief measures unconstitutional. Early in his second term, as you know, Roosevelt retaliated by trying to “pack” the Court by increasing the number of seats. This power play alienated even many of his allies, but it turned out not to be necessary. After 1937 the Court began seeing things Roosevelt’s way. It voted as he wished; several members obligingly retired; and soon he had appointed a majority of the justices. The country virtually got a new Constitution.

Roosevelt’s Court soon decided that the Tenth Amendment was a “truism,” of no real force. This meant that almost any federal act was ipso facto constitutional, and the powers “reserved” to the states and the people were just leftovers the federal government didn’t want, like the meal left for the jackals by the satisfied lion. There was almost no limit, now, on what the federal government could do. In effect, the powers of the federal government no longer had to come from the people by constitutional delegation: they could be created by simple political power.

Roosevelt also set the baneful precedent of using entitlement programs, such as Social Security, to buy some people’s votes with other people’s money. It was both a fatal corruption of democracy and the realization of the Servile State in America. The class of voting parasites has been swelling ever since.

So the New Deal didn’t just expand the power of the federal government; that had been done before. The New Deal did much deeper mischief: it struck at the whole principle of constitutional resistance to federal expansion. Congress didn’t need any constitutional amendment to increase its powers; it could increase its own powers ad hoc, at any time, by simple majority vote.

All this, of course, would have seemed monstrous to our ancestors. Even Alexander Hamilton, who favored a relatively strong central government in his time, never dreamed of a government so powerful.

The Court suffered a bloody defeat at Roosevelt’s hands, and since his time it has never found a major act of Congress unconstitutional. This has allowed the power of the federal government to grow without restraint. At the federal level, “checks and balances” has ceased to include judicial review.

This is a startling fact, flying as it does in the face of the familiar conservative complaints about the Court’s “activism.” When it comes to Congress, the Court has been absolutely passive. As if to compensate for its habit of capitulation to Congress, the Court’s post–World War II “activism” has been directed entirely against the states, whose laws it has struck down in areas that used to be considered their settled and exclusive provinces. Time after time, it has found “unconstitutional” laws whose legitimacy had stood unquestioned throughout the history of the Republic.

Notice how total the reversal of the Court’s role has been. It began with the duty, according to Hamilton, of striking down new seizures of power by Congress. Now it finds constitutional virtually everything Congress chooses to do. The federal government has assumed myriads of new powers nowhere mentioned or implied in the Constitution, yet the Court has never seriously impeded this expansion, or rather explosion, of novel claims of power. What it finds unconstitutional are the traditional powers of the states.

The postwar Court has done pioneering work in one notable area: the separation of church and state. I said “pioneering,” not praiseworthy. The Court has consistently imposed an understanding of the First Amendment that is not only exaggerated but unprecedented — most notoriously in its 1962 ruling that prayer in public schools amounts to an “establishment of religion.” This interpretation of the Establishment Clause has always been to the disadvantage of Christianity and of any law with roots in Christian morality. And it’s impossible to doubt that the justices who voted for this interpretation were voting their predilections.

Maybe that’s the point. I’ve never heard it put quite this way, but the Court’s boldest rulings showed something less innocent than a series of honest mistakes. Studying these cases and others of the Court’s liberal heyday, one never gets the sense that the majority was suppressing its own preferences; it was clearly enacting them. Those rulings can be described as wishful thinking run amok, and touched with more than a little arrogance. All in all, the Court displayed the opposite of the restrained and impartial temperament one expects even of a traffic-court judge, let alone a Supreme Court.

It’s ironic to recall Hamilton’s assurance that the Supreme Court would be “the least dangerous” of the three branches of the federal government. But Hamilton did give us a shrewd warning about what would happen if the Court were ever corrupted: in Federalist No. 78 he wrote that “liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other [branches].” Since Franklin Roosevelt, as I’ve said, the judiciary has in effect formed a union with the other two branches to aggrandize the power of the federal government at the expense of the states and the people.

This, in outline, is the constitutional history of the United States. You won’t find it in the textbooks, which are required to be optimistic, to present degeneration as development, and to treat the successive pronouncements of the Supreme Court as so many oracular revelations of constitutional meaning. A leading liberal scholar, Leonard Levy, has gone so far as to say that what matters is not what the Constitution says, but what the Court has said about the Constitution in more than 400 volumes of commentary.

This can only mean that the commentary has displaced the original text, and that “We the People” have been supplanted by “We the Lawyers.” We the People can’t read and understand our own Constitution. We have to have it explained to us by the professionals. Moreover, if the Court enjoys oracular status, it can’t really be criticized, because it can do no wrong. We may dislike its results, but future rulings will have to be derived from them as precedents, rather than from the text and logic of the Constitution. And notice that the “conservative” justices appointed by Republican presidents have by and large upheld not the original Constitution, but the most liberal interpretations of the Court itself — notably on the subject of abortion, which I’ll return to in a minute.

To sum up this little constitutional history. The history of the Constitution is the story of its inversion. The original understanding of the Constitution has been reversed. The Constitution creates a presumption against any power not plainly delegated to the federal government and a corresponding presumption in favor of the rights and powers of the states and the people. But we now have a sloppy presumption in favor of federal power. Most people assume the federal government can do anything it isn’t plainly forbidden to do.

The Ninth and Tenth Amendments were adopted to make the principle of the Constitution as clear as possible. Hamilton, you know, argued against adding a Bill of Rights, on grounds that it would be redundant and confusing. He thought it would seem to imply that the federal government had more powers than it had been given. Why say, he asked, that the freedom of the press shall not be infringed, when the federal government would have no power by which it could be infringed? And you can even make the case that he was exactly right. He understood, at any rate, that our freedom is safer if we think of the Constitution as a list of powers rather than as a list of rights.

Be that as it may, the Bill of Rights was adopted, but it was designed to meet his objection. The Ninth Amendment says: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The Tenth says: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Now what these two provisions mean is pretty simple. The Ninth means that the list of the people’s rights in the Constitution is not meant to be complete — that they still have many other rights, like the right to travel or to marry, which may deserve just as much respect as the right not to have soldiers quartered in one’s home in peacetime. The Tenth, on the other hand, means that the list of powers “delegated” to the federal government is complete — and that any other powers the government assumed would be, in the Framers’ habitual word, “usurped.”

As I said earlier, the Founders believed that our rights come from God, and the government’s powers come from us. So the Constitution can’t list all our rights, but it can and does list all the federal government’s powers.

You can think of the Constitution as a sort of antitrust act for government, with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments at its core. It’s remarkable that the same liberals who think business monopolies are sinister think monopolies of political power are progressive. When they can’t pass their programs because of the constitutional safeguards, they complain about “gridlock” — a cliché that shows they miss the whole point of the enumeration and separation of powers.

The Supreme Court Hijacked

2009-09-25T05:48:00.000-04:00

How Tyranny Came to America

by Joseph Sobran

http://www.sobran.com/articles/tyranny.shtml

Part 5

Supreme Court Hijacked

But the Supreme Court soon found other uses for the Fourteenth Amendment. It began striking down state laws as unconstitutional. This was an important new twist in American constitutional law. Hamilton, in arguing for judicial review in Federalist No. 78, had envisioned the Court as a check on Congress, resisting the illicit consolidation or centralization of power. And our civics books still describe the function of checks and balances in terms of the three branches of the federal government mutually controlling each other. But in fact, the Court was now countermanding the state legislatures, where the principle of checks and balances had no meaning, since those state legislatures had no reciprocal control on the Court. This development eventually set the stage for the convulsive Supreme Court rulings of the late twentieth century, from Brown v. Board of Education to Roe v. Wade.

The big thing to recognize here is that the Court had become the very opposite of the institution Hamilton and others had had in mind. Instead of blocking the centralization of power in the federal government, the Court was assisting it.

The original point of the federal system was that the federal government would have very little to say about the internal affairs of the states. But the result of the Civil War was that the federal government had a great deal to say about those affairs — in Northern as well as Southern states.

Note that this trend toward centralization was occurring largely under Republican presidents. The Democrat Grover Cleveland was one of the last great spokesmen for federalism. He once vetoed a modest $10,000 federal grant for drought relief on grounds that there was no constitutional power to do it. If that sounds archaic, remember that the federal principle remained strong long enough that during the 1950s, the federal highway program had to be called a “defense” measure in order to win approval, and federal loans to college students in the 1960s were absurdly called “defense” loans for the same reason. The Tenth Amendment is a refined taste, but it has always had a few devotees.

But federalism suffered some serious wounds during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. First came the income tax, its constitutionality established by the Sixteenth Amendment; this meant that every U.S. citizen was now, for the first time, directly accountable to the federal government. Then the Seventeenth Amendment required that senators be elected by popular vote rather than chosen by state legislators; this meant that the states no longer had their own representation in Congress, so that they now lost their remaining control over the federal government. The Eighteenth Amendment, establishing Prohibition, gave the federal government even greater powers over the country’s internal affairs. All these amendments were ominous signs that federalism was losing its traditional place in the hearts, and perhaps the minds, of Americans.

But again, notice that these expansions of federal power were at least achieved by amending the Constitution, as the Constitution itself requires. The Constitution doesn’t claim to be a “living document.” It is written on paper, not rubber.

Thumbnail History of the Constitution

2009-09-24T05:47:00.000-04:00

How Tyranny Came to America

by Joseph Sobran

http://www.sobran.com/articles/tyranny.shtml

Part 4

Thumbnail History of the Constitution

In order to appreciate what has happened, you have to stand back from all the details and look at the outline. What follows is a thumbnail history of the Constitution.

In the beginning the states were independent and sovereign. That is why they were called “states”: a state was not yet thought of as a mere subdivision of a larger unit, as is the case now. The universal understanding was that in ratifying the Constitution, the 13 states yielded a very little of their sovereignty, but kept most of it.

Those who were reluctant to ratify generally didn’t object to the powers the Constitution delegated to the federal government. But they were suspicious: they wanted assurance that if those few powers were granted, other powers, never granted, wouldn’t be seized too. In The Federalist, Hamilton and Madison argued at some length that under the proposed distribution of power the federal government would never be able to “usurp,” as they put it, those other powers. Madison wrote soothingly in Federalist No. 45 that the powers of the federal government would be “few and defined,” relating mostly to war and foreign policy, while those remaining with the states would be “numerous and indefinite,” and would have to do with the everyday domestic life of the country. The word usurpation occurs numberless times in the ratification debates, reflecting the chief anxiety the champions of the Constitution had to allay. And as a final assurance, the Tenth Amendment stipulated that the powers not “delegated” to the federal government were “reserved” to the separate states and to the people.

But this wasn’t enough to satisfy everyone. Well-grounded fears persisted. And during the first half of the nineteenth century, nearly every president, in his inaugural message, felt it appropriate to renew the promise that the powers of the federal government would not be exceeded, nor the reserved powers of the states transgressed. The federal government was to remain truly federal, with only a few specified powers, rather than “consolidated,” with unlimited powers.

The Civil War, or the War Between the States if you like, resulted from the suspicion that the North meant to use the power of the Union to destroy the sovereignty of the Southern states. Whether or not that suspicion was justified, the war itself produced that very result. The South was subjugated and occupied like a conquered country. Its institutions were profoundly remade by the federal government; the United States of America was taking on the character of an extensive, and highly centralized, empire. Similar processes were under way in Europe, as small states were consolidated into large ones, setting the stage for the tyrannies and gigantic wars of the twentieth century.

Even so, the three constitutional amendment ratified after the war contain a significant clause: “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Why is this significant? Because it shows that even the conquerors still understood that a new power of Congress required a constitutional amendment. It couldn’t just be taken by majority vote, as it would be today. If the Congress then had wanted a national health plan, it would have begun by asking the people for an amendment to the Constitution authorizing it to legislate in the area of health care. The immediate purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to provide a constitutional basis for a proposed civil rights

The Constitution is NOT a Living Document

2009-09-23T05:47:00.000-04:00

How Tyranny Came to America

by Joseph Sobran

http://www.sobran.com/articles/tyranny.shtml

Part 3

Constitution is NOT a Living Document

Now of course nobody in American politics, not even the most fanatical liberal, will admit openly that he doesn’t care what the Constitution says and isn’t going to let it interfere with his agenda. Everyone professes to respect it — even the Supreme Court. That’s the problem. The U.S. Constitution serves the same function as the British royal family: it offers a comforting symbol of tradition and continuity, thereby masking a radical change in the actual system of power.

So the people who mean to do without the Constitution have come up with a slogan to keep up appearances: they say the Constitution is a “living document,” which sounds like a compliment. They say it has “evolved” in response to “changing circumstances,” etc. They sneer at the idea that such a mystic document could still have the same meanings it had two centuries ago, or even, I guess, sixty years ago, just before the evolutionary process started accelerating with fantastic velocity. These people, who tend with suspicious consistency to be liberals, have discovered that the Constitution, whatever it may have meant in the past, now means — again, with suspicious consistency — whatever suits their present convenience.

Do liberals want big federal entitlement programs? Lo, the Interstate Commerce Clause turns out to mean that the big federal programs are constitutional! Do liberals oppose capital punishment? Lo, the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” turns out to mean that capital punishment is unconstitutional! Do liberals want abortion on demand? Lo, the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments, plus their emanations and penumbras, turn out to mean that abortion is nothing less than a woman’s constitutional right!

Can all this be blind evolution? If liberals were more religious, they might suspect the hand of Providence behind it! This marvelous “living document” never seems to impede the liberal agenda in any way. On the contrary: it always seems to demand, by a wonderful coincidence, just what liberals are prescribing on other grounds.

Take abortion. Set aside your own views and feelings about it. Is it really possible that, as the Supreme Court in effect said, all the abortion laws of all 50 states — no matter how restrictive, no matter how permissive — had always been unconstitutional? Not only that, but no previous Court, no justice on any Court in all our history — not Marshall, not Story, not Taney, not Holmes, not Hughes, not Frankfurter, not even Warren — had ever been recorded as doubting the constitutionality of those laws. Everyone had always taken it for granted that the states had every right to enact them.

Are we supposed to believe, in all seriousness, that the Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade was a response to the text of the Constitution, the discernment of a meaning that had eluded all its predecessors, rather than an enactment of the current liberal agenda? Come now.

And notice that the parts of this “living document” don’t develop equally or consistently. The Court has expanded the meaning of some of liberalism’s pet rights, such as freedom of speech, to absurd lengths; but it has neglected or even contracted other rights, such as property rights, which liberalism is hostile to.

Enumerated Powers and the Separation of Powers

2009-09-22T05:46:00.000-04:00

How Tyranny Came to America

by Joseph Sobran

http://www.sobran.com/articles/tyranny.shtml

Part 2

Enumerated Powers and the Separation of Powers

The Constitution does two things. First, it delegates certain enumerated powers to the federal government. Second, it separates those powers among the three branches. Most people understand the secondary principle of the separation of powers. But they don’t grasp the primary idea of delegated and enumerated powers.

Consider this. We have recently had a big national debate over national health care. Advocates and opponents argued long and loud over whether it could work, what was fair, how to pay for it, and so forth. But almost nobody raised the basic issue: Where does the federal government get the power to legislate in this area? The answer is: Nowhere. The Constitution lists 18 specific legislative powers of Congress, and not a one of them covers national health care.

As a matter of fact, none of the delegated powers of Congress — and delegated is always the key word — covers Social Security, or Medicaid, or Medicare, or federal aid to education, or most of what are now miscalled “civil rights,” or countless public works projects, or equally countless regulations of business, large and small, or the space program, or farm subsidies, or research grants, or subsidies to the arts and humanities, or … well, you name it, chances are it’s unconstitutional. Even the most cynical opponents of the Constitution would be dumbfounded to learn that the federal government now tells us where we can smoke. We are less free, more heavily taxed, and worse governed than our ancestors under British rule. Sometimes this government makes me wonder: Was George III really all that bad?

Let’s be clear about one thing. Constitutional and unconstitutional aren’t just simple terms of approval and disapproval. A bad law may be perfectly constitutional. A wise and humane law may be unconstitutional. But what is almost certainly bad is a constant disposition to thwart or disregard the Constitution.

It’s not just a matter of what is sometimes called the “original intent” of the authors of the Constitution. What really matters is the common, explicit, unchallenged understanding of the Constitution, on all sides, over several generations. There was no mystery about it.

The logic of the Constitution was so elegantly simple that a foreign observer could explain it to his countrymen in two sentences. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “the attributes of the federal government were carefully defined [in the Constitution], and all that was not included among them was declared to remain to the governments of the individual states. Thus the government of the states remained the rule, and that of the federal government the exception.”

The Declaration of Independence, which underlies the Constitution, holds that the rights of the people come from God, and that the powers of the government come from the people. Let me repeat that: According to the Declaration of Independence, the rights of the people come from God, and the powers of the government come from the people. Unless you grasp this basic order of things, you’ll have a hard time understanding the Constitution.

The Constitution was the instrument by which the American people granted, or delegated, certain specific powers to the federal government. Any power not delegated was withheld, or “reserved.” As we’ll see later, these principles are expressed particularly in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, two crucial but neglected provisions of the Constitution.

Let me say it yet again: The rights of the people come from God. The powers of government come from the people. The American people delegated the specific powers they wanted the federal government to have through the Constitution. And any additional powers they wanted to grant were supposed to be added by amendment.

It’s largely because we’ve forgotten these simple principles that the country is in so much trouble. The powers of the federal government have multiplied madly, with only the vaguest justifications and on the most slippery pretexts. Its chief business now is not defending our rights but taking and redistributing our wealth. It has even created its own economy, the tax economy, which is parasitical on the basic and productive voluntary economy. Even much of what passes for “national defense” is a kind of hidden entitlement program, as was illustrated when President George Bush warned some states during the 1992 campaign that Bill Clinton would destroy jobs by closing down military bases. Well, if those bases aren’t necessary for our defense, they should be closed down.

The Failure to Teach the History of Our Ancestors

2009-09-21T05:45:00.000-04:00

How Tyranny Came to America

by Joseph Sobran

http://www.sobran.com/articles/tyranny.shtml

Part 1: The Failure to Teach the History of Our Ancestors

One of the great goals of education is to initiate the young into the conversation of their ancestors; to enable them to understand the language of that conversation, in all its subtlety, and maybe even, in their maturity, to add to it some wisdom of their own.

The modern American educational system no longer teaches us the political language of our ancestors. In fact our schooling helps widen the gulf of time between our ancestors and ourselves, because much of what we are taught in the name of civics, political science, or American history is really modern liberal propaganda. Sometimes this is deliberate. Worse yet, sometimes it isn’t. Our ancestral voices have come to sound alien to us, and therefore our own moral and political language is impoverished. It’s as if the people of England could no longer understand Shakespeare, or Germans couldn’t comprehend Mozart and Beethoven.

So to most Americans, even those who feel oppressed by what they call big government, it must sound strange to hear it said, in the past tense, that tyranny “came” to America. After all, we have a constitution, don’t we? We’ve abolished slavery and segregation. We won two world wars and the Cold War. We still congratulate ourselves before every ballgame on being the Land of the Free. And we aren’t ruled by some fanatic with a funny mustache who likes big parades with thousands of soldiers goose-stepping past huge pictures of himself.

For all that, we no longer fully have what our ancestors, who framed and ratified our Constitution, thought of as freedom — a careful division of power that prevents power from becoming concentrated and unlimited. The word they usually used for concentrated power was consolidated — a rough synonym for fascist. And the words they used for any excessive powers claimed or exercised by the state were usurped and tyrannical. They would consider the modern “liberal” state tyrannical in principle; they would see in it not the opposite of the fascist, communist, and socialist states, but their sister.

If Washington and Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton could come back, the first thing they’d notice would be that the federal government now routinely assumes thousands of powers never assigned to it — powers never granted, never delegated, never enumerated. These were the words they used, and it’s a good idea for us to learn their language. They would say that we no longer live under the Constitution they wrote. And the Americans of a much later era — the period from Cleveland to Coolidge, for example — would say we no longer live even under the Constitution they inherited and amended.

I call the present system “Post–Constitutional America.” As I sometimes put it, the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.

What’s worse is that our constitutional illiteracy cuts us off from our own national heritage. And so our politics degenerates into increasingly bitter and unprincipled quarrels about who is going to bear the burdens of war and welfare.

I don’t want to sound like an oracle on this subject. As a typical victim of modern public education and a disinformed citizen of this media-ridden country, I took a long time — an embarrassingly long time — to learn what I’m passing on. It was like studying geometry in old age, and discovering how simple the basic principles of space really are. It was the old story: In order to learn, first I had to unlearn. Most of what I’d been taught and told about the Constitution was misguided or even false. And I’d never been told some of the most elementary things, which would have saved me a tremendous amount of confusion.

Post Constitutional America

2009-09-18T11:37:00.000-04:00

I think of my blog as a reference for young people (and their parents) who seek to understand what it means to be free and why liberty from government tyranny is so essential to being a free person. Sometimes I will read a column and think it should be included in its entirety on my blog. Columns are, in general, too long for a blog. Most visitors to a blog will only give one minute of their time to read a post. That is why I have resisted re-posting long columns. Joseph Sobran wrote a column a few years ago that deserves to be read by every American but especially every young American. I could simply link to it but it is so important that I want to re-post it here. But instead of posting it as one big article, I have broken it into multiple posts so it is easier to digest. I have given titles to the parts; they were not part of the original column as penned by Mr. Sobran. I thought about editing the column to make it shorter, but I decided that would not be appropriate without Mr. Sobran’s permission. So starting next week, I will be posting part one of Mr. Sorban’s column on post-constitutional America titled “How Tyranny Came to America.”

L4K One Year Anniversary

2009-09-17T07:00:00.001-04:00

For symbolic reasons, I started this blog one year ago on Constitution Day. At times I have wanted to quit. My mind wonders and my interests change. However, one thing that does not change is the desire for my children to grow up free in a land of liberty, so I press on. And I am encouraged when I get a lot of visitors to my blog. I captured this screen shot of my Stat Counter log one day in May. It is gratifying to see so many people visit from all around the world. It reminds me that there is still a hunger for liberty. So I will press on and I encourage you to do the same - FOR LIBERTY!

Could your congressman or senator do any better?

2009-09-17T05:03:00.000-04:00

Free Money!

2009-09-16T22:26:00.000-04:00

Giving Pie to Me

2009-09-03T20:32:00.002-04:00

HT: iowntheworld

The Government Can Video

2009-08-27T05:58:00.000-04:00

HT: David

Garet Garrett on The Decline of the American Republic

2009-08-21T10:54:00.002-04:00

A reprint of a Garet Garrett article first published in 1952 in the Freeman on how a republic becomes an empire . . .

We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night. The precise moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say, "You now are entering Imperium." Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history was saying: "Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing may be irreversible." And now, not far ahead, is a sign that reads: "No U Turns."
If you say there were no frightening omens, that is true. The political foundations did not quake; the graves of the Fathers did not fly open; the Constitution did not tear itself up. If you say people did not will it, that also is true. But if you say therefore it has not happened, then you have been so long bemused by words that your mind will not believe what the eye can see, even as in the jungle the terrified primitive, on meeting the lion, importunes magic by saying to himself, "He is not there." That a republic may vanish is an elementary schoolbook fact.
....
Let it be current history. How much does the younger half of this generation reflect upon the fact that in its own time a complete revolution has taken place in the relations between government and people? It may be doubted that one college student in a thousand could even state it clearly. The first article of our inherited tradition, implicit in American thought from the beginning until a few years ago, was this: Government is the responsibility of a self-governing people. That doctrine has been swept away; only the elders remember it.
Now, in the name of democracy, it is accepted as a political fact that people are the responsibility of government. The forms of republican government survive; the character of the state has changed. Formerly the people supported government and set limits to it and minded their own lives.

To finish reading the article, go to Mises.org

Liberty Lessons Video

2009-08-17T05:12:00.000-04:00

Larry Reed, the president of FEE, reminds us in this ReasonTV interview that more government means less liberty. Specifically, he makes these three points:

1. Government can provide you with absolutely nothing except that which it has first taken from somebody else.

2. A government big enough to give you want you want, is big enough to take everything you have.

3. A free people are not economically equal, and an economically equal people are not free.

FEE has been in the battle for liberty for a long time and continues to do some of the best educational work. Watch the video.

HT: Pete (Pete is responsible for the three summary points as well)

Cash for Old Lemonade Cups

2009-08-05T05:21:00.003-04:00

The L4K Lemonade Stand Chronicles: Cash for Old Lemonade Cups

The summer rush was over. The demand for lemonade was not what it once was. Some lemonade stands were closing. How could Barry and the boys convince people to buy more lemonade when they didn’t really want to? As usual, Barry had an idea. He would convince the city council to subsidize the sale of lemonade. But he didn’t want it to be so obvious that he and his lemonade stand would benefit so he would convince the city council that old lemonade cups were hurting the environment because they were made out of plastic containing BPA and new plastic cups were so much better for the environment. These cups would come with “free” lemonade. The city council would reimburse the lemonade stands for the “free” lemonade.

The city council, having a reputation of passing laws regardless of the merits, would be more than eager to go along. The council members would be seen as being concerned about the environment and they would help some of their more dependent voters, uh, I mean citizens. What could go wrong with this plan?

Little Timmy and Larry were getting excited. But then, Barry broke out in a loud laugh. He laughed so hard he had to bend over because his side hurt. The other boys were looking at Barry and wondering what was so funny. When Barry finally stopped laughing he said, “I was just joking. No government would ever go along with an idea that stupid.”

If only that were true, Barry, if only.

Russ Roberts' Clunker Quiz

2009-08-04T20:25:00.000-04:00

This is really all you need to know about the government's stupid Cash for Clunkers program. GMU Economics professor Russ Roberts shows how easy this blogging thing must be for a true professional. See here.

Imagine you’re a member of Congress. You’re a fan of the Cash for Clunkers program. You discover that the $1 billion that Congress budgeted for the program has been spent in FOUR DAYS. The program is now out of money. What do you do?
A. Realize that $4500 per clunker was too big a subsidy and that you can achieve the same effects with a much smaller amount.
B. Worry that maybe there is some fraud in the program and that some of the cash isn’t going to clunkers
C. Increase the budget by $2 billion
The correct answer for clunkheads is C, of course. That’s the wise choice when you are spending other people’s money. What fun that must be!

Code Blue

2009-08-01T08:50:00.000-04:00

A very personal story from Ilana Mercer . . .

"Code Blue, intensive care unit," "Code Blue, intensive care unit!"
When the Code-Blue alarm sounded over the hospital's loudspeaker system, my husband and I knew it sounded for our daughter. It was 11 p.m. The hallways of the British Columbia hospital were dark. Only one emergency operating theatre was in use. She was in it. The skeletal staff came running. Resuscitation carts were rushed toward the theatre.
My own heart nearly stopped, because she is my heart.

The rest of the story can be found here.

LemonAID

2009-07-27T05:38:00.003-04:00

The L4K Lemonade Stand Chronicles: LemonAID

Ever since it had turned hot, the boy’s lemonade stand had been very busy; so much so they had to hire some of their friends to work the stand. As the demand for the lemonade went up, the boys raised their price to cover the additional cost of hiring workers. The increase in the price of a cup of lemonade had not deterred too many people from buying their cold refreshing lemonade since the heat had made it more popular.

In response, some parents decided to buy pre-paid cards to give to their children as part of their allowances. These parents were able to get a good deal from the lemonade stands since they were buying so many cups in advance. Unfortunately, by having lemonade pre-paid, these children rarely tried to find the best deal among the town’s four lemonade stands.

There were, however, two groups who were especially sensitive to the increase in the price of lemonade: the elderly who were living on a fixed income and the children from the poor part of town.

The elderly thought it would be a good idea if they didn’t have to pay the full cost of a cup of lemonade so they showed up at the next town hall meeting to ask that other lemonade drinkers help to pay for their lemonade purchases. And since the elderly typically vote in large numbers, the town’s mayor and council members were more than eager to help their elderly voters, uh, I mean citizens.

The town council decided it would require all operators of lemonade stands to collect a fee on each cup sold. The lemonade stand operators would send the money collected to the town council who would in turn send a check to the elderly to help cover the cost of their lemonade purchases. Since the elderly tend to drink more lemonade than younger people, the fee wasn’t enough to pay for all the cups of lemonade they consumed. So the town council decided to set a lower price that it would pay for a cup of lemonade sold to the elderly and require lemonade stand operators to serve all elderly persons.

The elderly’s access to lemonade was fixed, but what about the kids from the poor part of town? The town council decided to buy these voters, uh, I mean help the poor by passing a law requiring all persons who shows up at a lemonade stand thirsty be given a cup of lemonade even if they can’t pay.

The only kids who had to pay more for lemonade were the ones who were not given an allowance but had to work for their lemonade money. Some mowed lawns, some baby sat, and some delivered newspapers. They did not have access to pre-paid cards and didn’t live in the poor part of town so they cold not get free lemonade. The lemonade stands simply increased the price to these kids to cover their costs which were not being paid for by the elderly and the poor kids.

When word got out that the town’s lemonade stands had to serve cups of lemonade even if you didn’t have money to pay for it, boys from surrounding towns would ride their bikes to this town just to get free lemonade. Even after a few of the town’s citizens complained about that, the town council passed an ordinance prohibiting the lemonade stand operators from even asking about where a kid lives.

The once thriving lemonade stands in this town were no longer healthy. Needless to say the system was broke. The free enterprise system had failed. Something had to be done.

And Barry had an idea.

To be continued (but not right away as the summer is for family not blogging).

Frugal McDougall, A Rhyme for Our Times

2009-07-23T20:37:00.000-04:00

by D. Jones

Frugal McDougall worked very hard,

Bought things with cash and not credit cards,
And when it came to the things that he bought,
Things that he needed were all that he sought.

Once he was sure that his bills were all paid,
The money left over was carefully saved.
You see in the future he hoped to retire
And knew very well what that would require.

His neighbors were foolish and laden with greed.
They focused on wants instead of on needs.
They went out to dinner about every night.
When you’re middle class that’s one of your rights.

When they got their paychecks they spent every dime.
Having money left over would have been a crime.
Their credit was pushed to its uppermost limit,
When it came to debt they were very deep in it.

When Frugal McDougall would try to explain
The value of saving they all called him names,
So he wouldn’t bother most of the time.
He said it was something like ‘pearls before swine’

Meanwhile the neighbors got credit card offers,
Promising money to fill up their coffers.
Consumed by their greed they filled out every one,
With barely a thought as to what they had done.

And when the cards came they all ran about
Foolishly spending till they were maxed out.
A pool for the yard, perhaps some new skis.
They spent money like it was growing on trees.

Some even went on a cruise to the Med,
Where they all laid around looking tanned and well fed.
No thought was given to how they would pay,
For surely a bill would be coming their way.

In complete disbelief McDougall looked on.
He knew very well that they had it all wrong.
And the foolish idea that was shared by them all
Was that happiness was now on sale at the mall.

He’d been chastened so often he now bit his lip,
For fear if he didn’t he’d let something slip.
His neighbors would learn of his total disdain
For the way that their money was thrown down the drain.

Instead he would focus on his quiet life,
With his quiet children and his quiet wife.
In their simple way their needs were all met,
And their simple life was quite free of debt.

Then one day his neighbor came home joyously
In a gigantic brand new SUV
Frugal McDougall just stood there and gawked,
Confused and bewildered and totally shocked.

He knew that his neighbor made twelve bucks an hour
And shouldn’t have this kind of purchasing power.
And when asked how he paid for this monstrosity
The neighbor replied, “with my home equity.”

The debt didn’t matter, the man was a dunce,
Whose only concern had been "how much a month."
The neighborhood pondered what he had just said
And one by one light bulbs came on in their heads.

Then sure enough the very next day,
New cars appeared in every driveway.
McDougall now cautioned that they should take heed,
All this debt served no legitimate need,

Instead they were putting their futures at risk.
The response they delivered was angry and brisk.
Frugal McDougall was called a big fool,
And other mean names that were equally cruel.

"We are all rich," they boldly declared
As Frugal McDougall stood there and stared.
"Our homes are all worth more than twice what we paid!
The good life is ours and should not be delayed!"

But Frugal McDougall refused to be goaded
And as he expected the debt bomb exploded.
The neighborhood values were starting to fall,
Faster and faster effecting them all.

Then as his neighbor stood looking distressed,
The new SUV was being repossessed.
Soon all around, the neighborhood toys,
The ones that had recently brought so much joy,

Were all repossessed or put up for sale.
The pleasures they brought had grown a bit stale.
Purse strings were tightened as jobs were now lost.
It seems the free money came at a steep cost.

Banks were collapsing as everyone bailed
From upside down houses and lifestyles that failed.
All of the debt that could not be repaid,
Was now wreaking havoc that would not be stayed.

Government bailouts now came on the scene
As political leaders were all very keen
To keep credit flowing and money being spent,
So trillions of dollars were foolishly lent,

In a desperate attempt to keep prices high,
A fact that they won’t even try to deny.
These actions were more than a little perverse,
For adding more debt only made the mess worse.

This of course left them with one thing to do.
They needed more sources of tax revenue,
So small businesses that were already hurting
Were saddled with costly additional burdens.

Many scaled back hoping they could prevail
But quite a few more of them now simply failed.
So many neighbors were now out of work,
They turned on McDougall and called him a jerk!

The papers had all said that he was to blame,
Though none had specifically called him by name.
In a foolish attempt to curry some favor
It seems that they now blamed the problem on savers.

They said "greedy savers are hording their cash
And collectively made the economy crash."
His penchant for saving was very well known.
Poor McDougall’s cover was thoroughly blown.

“Tax him,” folks cried as they all shook their fists
“And tax him some more if he tries to resist!
He has more money than he’ll ever need,”
They cried in a horrid expression of greed.

Poor Frugal McDougall was truly confused,
Saddened, frustrated and now feeling used.
He’d tried to warn people of what lay ahead,
But they didn’t listen and blamed him instead.

The country can never be restored to health,
As long as we’re exporting all of our wealth.
Closing our factories, exporting our jobs
Turning the people into angry mobs

And all of this spending with no end in sight
Is the most direct cause of our national plight!
How did this happen, where did it begin?
This foolish game’s left us no way to win.

Now the brave politicians all deny fault
As the nations economy grinds to a halt
Is this the end of the U.S. of A?
Will McDougall’s country now fade away?

He doesn’t know and he really can’t tell,
But from where he’s standing it doesn’t look well.

Originally posted on Mish's blog.