Not For You To Take [Hostages Version]

“How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four; calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” - Abraham Lincoln

Recently, a liberal blogger, heady with the euphoria of select Democrats forcing the passage of the Health Care Takeover of 2010, in the face of bipartisan resistance, published a post precociously titled “No, You Cannot Have Your Country Back.” in response to the cries of some conservative Americans, who watched the proceeding in horror, realizing to what extent this bill proposes to entangle government into the lives of every day Americans.

The post did its level best to tar those opposed to the government usurpation in the predictable terms, with retardation soaked references to “Our Country” [that of conservatives] having ended with the Emancipation Proclamation, taking the standard leftist accusation of “Racism!” in the face of resistance and delivering it indirectly (What a clever boy! Maybe MSNBC will give you a show!). These accusations are no substitute for arguments, and people of substance no longer accept this as the condemnation and assault on character that they once did. We would rather deal in the currency of proof and logic rather than the economy of ignorant emotion and spittle-flecked baseless denunciation. It also contained the predictable attempts to describe how this monstrosity is simply Congress fulfilling its “power” to provide for the general welfare, and declaring this presumptive overreach a moral undertaking, done to fulfill the right to pursue happiness. Shockingly, it doesn’t sound any more intelligent when he said it than when the Speaker of the House waxed eloquent with the same sophistry upon the passage of the bill.

But it also reveals a nearly incomprehensible arrogance and inability to grasp the most basic of realities.

This country is not for you to take.

Success in incrementally usurping authority that you were never intended to have has emboldened you to the point of unrestrained cockiness. You have built your power on the dependency of people too gullible to believe that they could not manage their own affairs without the “assistance” of a government entirely too eager to be generous to a select few with the earnings of many others. You cloaked your own intentions with a cloying excuse about how you only intended to help those less fortunate, and you tacked conditions upon this assistance that destroyed the families of those “assisted” and made government the de facto head of these families. You fostered a sense of entitlement that would soon dwarf any charitable intent raised as a justification of such “assistance” to begin with. And then you fed the beast. You fed the beast until it became so bloated, and so unwieldy that it became the exception that ate the rule. Your subjects, totally dependent upon you soon accepted the premise that the entitlements that for decades had supplanted individual ambition was a right, given to them by a generous and benevolent government.

But no matter how much you have attempted to teach and breed the knowledge out of us, we as Americans do indeed have particular rights, and they are not granted to us by the government; we took hold of them despite government. This is our birthright, a legacy of centuries, of something so precious that the very Declaration of these rights echos across the generations, and looks upon we, the keepers our own liberties, with a stern countenance, and reminds us to this day that we have a republic, if we can keep it.

The utopia that you, our self-appointed betters, keep trying to push upon us is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind for we, their posterity. Any man who must look to the government as the provider of the necessities of his own well-being, is not, and cannot be free. Free men know that the only proper role of government is as the guardian of his rights to control every aspect of his own destiny and to be secure in the ability to provide for himself in the manner in which he sees fit, unmolested by the petty jealousies and covetous actions of his neighbors. The recent actions of Congress and the President do not honor the principles on which this nation was founded; those men knew a government that purports to regulate any market in which it also competes is an enemy of freedom. Any government which does so funded by the public fisk with the intent to drive competitors out of business is a thief, and any government which wraps itself in moral pronouncements and self-congratulations as it does so is a liar and sophist.

When we seized our God-given rights, and threw off the yoke of an oppressive government an ocean away, we did not do so with the intent to assemble our own hydra-headed beast here on our shores, poking a head into every aspect of how we live our lives, how we spend our money, and how we choose to live. This bill, by its very nature, will necessarily lead to government making decisions about our treatment, our diets, and our incomes. By its nature, this intrusion into our personal and private decisions, this peering into our individual bank accounts, this ability to pass judgment on our diets and other decisions that we were formerly free to make without such intrusion violate restrictions on government placed upon it by “We the People” with the ratification of the Bill of Rights. A government free to do such things is one that is no longer restrained by the Fourth Amendment “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.”

No matter how hard you try, you cannot change the meaning of these words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

These words were not committed to paper to proclaim a belief in the idea that all men are and should be of equal condition. Indeed, if they had intended such a thing to be true, then they would have designed a government that would not have expressly enumerated powers to the government, and specifically stated that others were reserved to smaller sovereigns, and the people themselves. Indeed, if this had been their intent, then there would have been no mention of people having themselves, houses, papers, and effects to have secure from government intrusions, because a government intended to enforce equality of condition could not allow any notion of privacy or private property to exist. The equality that Jefferson spoke of was equality of opportunity, the idea that anyone with the same abilities and the same ambition could achieve the same things for themselves. This notion was embodied in the lives of these men, who were all well-educated, but possessed varying levels of ambition and ability to go with their well-trained intellect.

This gulf that exists between the nation that was, and the nation that you would foist upon us, is likely to breed contempt between the champions of each. Passions will be inflamed between such people. Both will claim that righteousness is part and parcel of their cause. However, there is no morality in a belief that one has the right or duty to declare that another makes too much and must be compelled to give generously to those who don’t make enough. When we empower those who believe that there is, there will never be any incentive for restraint, and those who have more, for what ever the reason, be it the result of harder and longer labor, shrewd investment, or inheritance can never be secure in the belief that government represents them. Any government that would so victimize some its people and give what it steals to others no longer has the consent of the governed. And when a free people recognize that their government no longer subscribes to the principles set forth in its charters and bylaw, chiefly limited government and fiscal responsibility, and talk of restoring the government they were born to, it cannot be treason, no matter how much the unwittingly enslaved wish it to be. Nor can it be sedition, as those who would support tyrants want it to be, as such a “crime” can only exist as an affront to the right of free speech. We have a right to be angry with those who would lie to us as part of their attempt to steal from us, and put us under the yoke of a mediocrity that will make us all equal, with a few of us more equal than the rest. We have a right to express the idea that such a government no longer enjoys our consent, and that such betrayals earn the penalties reserved for betrayal. Because being an American still means something. And that something is not soft tyranny of dependency on government, and the hard tyranny of a government that presumes to retain the consent of the governed while usurping rights reserved to the states, and the people themselves. If you choose enslavement, there are plenty of places you can go, but we will not be chained because you are not willing to believe in yourselves, and instead are willing to cede your freedoms and responsibilities to government in exchange for whatever it chooses to let you have. The promise of the New World was for people who would make their own destiny. The Old World still exists for those who want to mire themselves in the restraints of collectivism and dependency on welfare states.

We live in a free country. It is not for you to take. And we will not be shamed or cowed into accepting your chains. The tyranny of political correctness holds no sway over us, because we do not live in a world where we perceive ourselves victims, and need government to legitimize a perception of ourselves as such. And when we find that you have gone too far, and taken too much, there will be no more warning. The time for talk will indeed be over, and unlike your Chicago Messiah™, we will not continually proclaim it, like the insecure pretender who continually repeats himself because he believes that no one of consequence is paying attention to him. When we stop talking, then you will understand the admonition against angering a patient person.

216 Comments

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Comments RSS