“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: ‘tis dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.”[1]
-Thomas Paine, “The Crisis Number 1,” 1776.
On July 3rd my wife and I went and saw the fireworks hosted by my home town, due to the way that calendars work (a science that still mystifies me even though I have a history degree) Independence Day was on a Tuesday this year and as such the authorities of our town sanctioned that the fireworks will commence the night before the actual day. Thankfully we live less than a mile away from the event which meant that we did not have to deal with the nightmare of traffic and dealing with parking (how dare other people join us in the celebration of the United States’ independence). Due to this we were able to directly benefit two families from our church and managed to find spots to watch the show within 40 feet or so of where they deployed the fireworks.
As we watched the rockets shoot into the sky to explode into brilliant colors of green, white, blue, red, and yellow; as the smells of sulfur and potassium nitrate drifted in the wind with the smoke; as we listened to the booming explosions (intentionally meant to simulate the sounds of war); I felt very somber.
Independence Day for years has filled me with mixed emotions.
Pride and sadness.
Hope and despair.
I have felt this way for many years and each year July 4th and the days around that date are a time for reflection for myself, as well as a time for reflection for all Americans and liberty loving people everywhere. Perhaps I am not alone in this but part of my reflection and meditation is watching videos and documentaries not only about the time period involved but also the larger ideas involved in the holiday. Some of the videos that I believe to be required viewing for many Americans can be found in this citation.[2]
But in particular I tend to watch and re-watch this video produced by all groups a video game developer:
Perhaps the video itself is not the most intellectual of videos regarding the American Revolution, perhaps it can be seen as a fluff piece solely for the purpose of marketing a video game. That is all true. But at the same time it does bring a tear to my eye, thinking about the risks that were involved in the fight for American independence.
The dangers that so many risked to their reputations, their economic standings, their homes, and their very lives. As Benjamin Franklin put in his wry fashion, “We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”[4] We tend to focus upon the people who were in leadership positions in telling the stories of the past, this applies to the American Revolution as well as every other historical narrative. We tend to focus upon the personalities of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin. We tend to focus upon the Founding Fathers as we have now taken to calling them in American culture. The personalities and the actions of these men are certainly important and I will certainly reference them and quote them as this blog post goes on, but what I appreciate so much about that video; a commercial for a not very good Ubisoft video game; is that it briefly puts the conflict as a whole into perspective. For a very similar reason I do enjoy the film The Patriot, despite its historical inaccuracy; the final battle scene is particularly powerful.[5]
It was not just the Founding Fathers as we call them that fought and bled and died between 1775-1783. 80,000 Americans joined the Continental Army and the various state militias during the war, of that 25,000 of them died during the war; 8,000 of which died from wounds that they suffered during battle; 25,000 more were wounded during the war itself.[6] It seems easy to just say the word “wounded” and leave it at that; words like that tend to mask what is actually meant. Musket balls to the gut, to the arms and legs. Being stabbed with a bayonet. Having arms and legs sawed off with unclean, possibly rusted, bone saws with only a swig of whiskey as anesthetic. And if you are very, very lucky perhaps you will not get an infection from your most recent “medical procedure.” If you do get an infection all that you have are your prayers and the grace of the Good Lord to prevent you from succumbing.
Roughly 20,000 Americans were captured as Prisoners of War during the Revolutionary war.[7] Because the question of prisoners was a difficult issue for both sides to solve, the British held many American prisoners on various Prison Ships. On the HMS Jersey in particular roughly 1,000 men were kept on board in the ship’s hold. There they faced not only torture and abuse but also diseases like Small Pox, Typhoid, Yellow Fever, and dysentery as well as continued starvation. Roughly a dozen men died every night on this one ship. Overall, some 11,000 prisoners died on these kinds of ships over the course of the war.[8]
Americans from all walks of life faced daily dangers in not only serving in the Continental Army but also in supporting the American Independence Movement.
And what did they fight and die and suffer for?
That is an aspect that many Americans do not consider to this day. For many Americans the Fourth of July is nothing more than an excuse for a 3-Day Weekend and a barbecue. Historical ignorance is a problem for most of the world, but the historical ignorance about the American Revolution on the part of LIVING BREATHING AMERICANS is particularly disturbing.[9]
We all know the slogans (or at least I hope that we all know, the previous citation puts that very much in doubt) around the Revolution. “No taxation without representation,” “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” But very rarely, especially outside of a classroom, do we delve into what those ideas meant. It is truly a shame; Holidays, after all, are not merely meant for times of celebration, but also for reflection.
Ultimately if you boil down all of the rhetoric and actions during the American Revolution you will find a number of fundamental principles that made the American Revolution so categorically different from all others and that made the United States, for a time, the freest country on the face of the earth.
These are: 1. The rights and dignity of individual human beings is tantamount. 2. Governments are inherently dangerous and if we are to have them at all they must be strictly limited. And 3. Institutions of power are dangerous for any individual to hold yet alone utilize.
These are the three ideas that are at the heart of the American experiment, both in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself.
To be fair the American Revolutionaries did not invent these ideas out of whole cloth. Historians time and time again have correctly noted the influence of philosophers like John Locke and Montesquieu upon American colonies; they had such an influence over the Founding Fathers that one historian asserted that “Jefferson copied Locke.”[10] Perhaps the most famous and justified instance of plagiarism ever. Over a century before the American Revolution for instance John Winthrop addressed the Massachusetts General Court thusly:
“I entreat you to consider, that when you choose magistrates, you take them from among yourselves, men subject to like passions as you are. Therefore when you see infirmities in us, you should reflect upon your own….”[11]
142 years later his great-great-great-grandson James Winthrop had very similar things to say on the subject of government authority and the dangers therein. Under the pen name “Agrippa” he wrote:
“no extensive empire can be governed upon republican principles, and that such a government will degenerate to a despotism, unless it be made up of a confederacy of smaller states, each having the full powers of internal regulation. This is precisely the principle which has hitherto preserved our freedom….The experience of all mankind has proved the prevalence of a disposition to use power wantonly. It is therefore as necessary to defend an individual against the majority in a republic as against the king in a monarchy.”[12] (emphasis added).
This trend of not trusting government, particularly a large government, was present in the American colonies for over a century before the Revolution, was present during the Revolution, and very much after the Revolution. What is of interest to note that the Founding Fathers were all very much in favor of a republic as the ideal form of government. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists took time to criticize not only the dangers of monarchism but as well as the dangers of democracy.
James Madison in Federalist Number 48:
“In a government where numerous and extensive prerogatives are placed in the hands of an hereditary monarch, the executive department is very justly regarded as the source of danger, and watched with all the jealousy which a zeal of liberty ought to inspire. In a democracy, where a multitude of people exercise in person the legislative functions and are continually exposed, by their incapacity for regular deliberation and concerted measures, to the ambitious intrigues of their executive magistrates, tyranny may well be apprehended, on some favorable emergency, to start up in the same quarter.”[13] (emphasis added).
During the Constitutional Conventions on June 18 the Anti-Federalists noted: “Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Both therefore ought to have power, that each may defend itself against the other.”[14] In the Fifth Cato Letter published on November 27, 1787 the author argues against the ratification of the new Constitution by comparing the office of the presidency to that of a monarchy: “if you adopt this government, you will incline to an arbitrary and odious aristocracy or monarchy—that the president possessed of the power, given him by this frame of government differs but very immaterially from the establishment of monarchy in Great Britain…”[15]
The Founding Fathers were deeply, deeply concerned with the powers of governments of any kind; in particular they were concerned with the abuse of such power. As Thomas Jefferson said in 1807, “History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.”[16] John Adams held similar sentiments: “The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.”[17] It is of interest to note that though Jefferson and Adams would become bitter political rivals and actively slander each other on nearly a daily basis, they nevertheless agreed upon the issue of government power and its abuse.
The United States was founded upon the ideals of small government and individual liberty. As Russian author and immigrant to the United States Ayn Rand wrote:
“America’s founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more—and nothing less. The rest—everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything ‘noble and just,’ and heroic, and great, and unprecedented inhuman history—was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle. The first consequence was the principle of political freedom, i.e., an individual’s freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by the government. The next was the economic implementation of political freedom: the system of capitalism.”[18]
These are the things that fill me with pride and hope. These are the reasons why watching the fireworks and hearing the “Star Spangled Banner” and watching The Patriot and a “silly” advertisement for a sub par AAA video game brings a tear to my eye every year. When I reflect upon the men and women who fought and bled and suffered, the thousands who wasted away on the prison ships. When I think of the 55 men who signed the Declaration of Independence “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”[19] When I think of all of those who defied the largest empire in the world with the largest and most well trained military, supplemented by highly trained mercenaries; when I think of the untrained colonial farmers fighting against the world, outmanned and outgunned and without hope. They fought and died with little to no chance for survival let alone victory….and won. As the villain in the historically inaccurate film The Patriot put it, “Quite impressive for a farmer with a pitchfork, wouldn’t you say?”[20]
When I think of all of these factors, and the nation and the ideals that our forefathers bequeathed unto us it fills me with immense pride.
But at the same time that my mind turns over the amazing story of the American Revolution, the radical ideas that they presented, and the seemingly providential nature of it all; my mind invariably turns to sadness and despair. Both emotions seem to revolve around the question: “Would they be proud of us today?”
I believe whole-heartedly that the answer would be “No.”
It seems that every step that the succeeding generations have taken after the American Revolution have been an ever-progressing frog march into the morass of tyranny. A tyranny that we have brought upon ourselves in the country that we inherited; and worse, a tyranny that we have proclaimed to be a liberation while bastardizing the legacies of the men who fought so hard 241 years ago.
To fully document every step of this march to the cliff’s edge would require a book length examination, but I have committed to limiting myself as much as I can and I will do my best to maintain that commitment.
Very early on in the nation’s history the ideas that motivated the Revolution itself began to be violated. The Anti-Federalists, for instance, argued very strongly against the ratification of the Constitution on the grounds that it would constitute a betrayal of the government sought in the Revolution. George Washington himself lead an army to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion after many farmers in Pennsylvania refused to pay taxes in the new currency. The passing of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 under John Adams made “it a crime to say or write anything ‘false, scandalous and malicious’ against the government, Congress, or the President, with intent to defame them, bring them into disrepute, or excite popular hatreds against them.”[21] It is of interest to note, as Zinn does not, that the Act only applied to the President and Congress and did not mention the Vice-President, meaning that anyone could write what they wanted about the Vice-President. At the time the Vice President was the runner up in the presidential election and was Thomas Jefferson who opposed John Adams’ policies.
This is not to excuse Thomas Jefferson’s presidency whatsoever, the Third President conducted the largest land transaction in American history, The Louisiana Purchase, without Congressional Approval.
You have Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, conducing a war without Congressional approval, suspending the right of Habeas Corpus, and jailing the editors of newspapers that criticized his policies. But perhaps that is a topic deserving of more detail in a different post.
Theodore Roosevelt’s attitudes towards the role of the presidency and of war in making the character of a nation as well as his strong man vision of leadership.[22] Teddy Roosevelt is probably the closest thing to a father of what has been called the “Imperial Presidency,” but that is a topic that deserves more attention at another time.
Woodrow Wilson authorizing the Federal Reserve, instituting the Selective Service Act, and arguably most egregiously signing the Espionage Act in June of 1917 which held that “Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the U.S….” An act that sent thousands of people who were against U.S. involvement in World War One to prison, including presidential candidate Eugene Debbs.[23] Along with that, Wilson’s creation of a command economy under the War Industries Board, a series of policy that Jonah Goldberg in his book Liberal Fascists characterized as “War Socialism.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is arguably the closest thing that the United States has had to a dictator, taking the legacies of his uncle and Wilson several steps further. He represented a radical shift in the relationship between the powers of the federal government and the freedoms of individual citizens, particularly in the realm of economic freedom. He did so regularly utilizing the logic of a war-time state in the midst of peace time, for instance on his first day of office he declared a banking holiday invoking the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, “Roosevelt declared that “all banking transactions shall be suspended.” Banks were permitted to reopen only after case-by-case inspection and approval by the government, a procedure that dragged on for months. This action heightened the public’s sense of crisis and allowed him to ignore traditional restraints on the power of the central government.”[24] FDR effectively cartelized vast swaths of industries under the National Recovery Administration, establishing strict price controls on nearly everything from the price of shirts to the wages that people were allowed to bring home. The NRA approved and administered 557 basic and 189 supplementary regulatory codes that covered 95% of all industrial employees.[25] Because of these price controls businesses oftentimes offered to cover their employee’s health insurance in lieu of a pay raises, effectively giving us our modern day health care system.[26] FDR effectively nationalized or cartelized certain segments of the economy under the Blue Eagle of the NRA, while also establishing the Civillian Conservation Corps an organization of government structured laborers who were all dressed in old military uniforms and took instructions from former military officers. With Executive Order 6102 in April of 1933 FDR made it illegal for the average American citizen to own gold bullion stating, “I, Franklin D. Roosevelt…do declare that said national emergency still continues to exist and…do hereby prohibit the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States by individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations…”[27] If a citizen did not hand over their gold to federal authorities as they swept the country, that citizen could face up to ten years in federal prison as well as a fine worth twice the amount that they did not turn over.[28] This is only skimming the surface of all that FDR did during his presidency, but when the Supreme Court consistently struck down the laws and regulations that Roosevelt wanted to pursue, he invariably strong armed them into compliance; by threatening to water down the role of the Supreme Court by doubling the number of justices on the bench, he essentially turned the Supreme Court into a rubber stamp the same way that Congress acquiesced to everything that Roosevelt wanted to do.[29] All of this was done and more while at the same time FDR broke the century old tradition of only serving two terms, being elected 5 times in a row.
These are relatively old examples of the encroachment of government power upon the lives of every day Americans. I will not at this time go into detail on the continuing encroachments through World War II, the Cold War, the Clinton Era, the Bush Era, or the Obama Era (these are subjects that all deserve individual blog posts).
Without going into too much specific detail let us look at the state of freedom in the United States in the modern day.
According to the 2017 Index of Economic Freedom Hong Kong was the Freest country in the World. The United States, the land of the free, the shining city on the hill was…17th.[30]
17th….
There are so many federal laws on the books that on average every American citizen commits three felonies every single day, largely without knowing they are doing so.[1] The Federal Register is published every year and contains every Federal Law that is currently in effect. In 1936 the Federal Register was 2,620 pages long, in 2012 the Federal Register was 78,961 pages long.[2] To put this in perspective one of the longest novels ever written is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, that book is 1,168 pages long. Atlas Shrugged fits into the Federal Register 67.6 times. Atlas Shrugged is roughly 50 hours long in audio format, so if you wanted to sit down and read the Federal Register for the year of 2012 it would take you 3,380 hours to complete. 140 days if you read continuously every hour of every day. And that is for the year of 2012, every year there are more and more laws added to the Federal Register, and that is not including all of the laws that each individual state has on its own books.
Government spending has ballooned out of control ever since the New Deal. As of July 6, 2017 at 9:06 AM MST the national debt is $19, 964, 142, 485, 028 and ever rising every second of every day.[3] About 6 years ago they calculated that the Federal government spends $6,850,000 every single minute of every single hour of every single day.[4] That was when the federal budget was $3,600,000,000,000 with a deficit of $1,300,000,000,000.[5] The budget for 2016 was $3,900,000,000,000 with a deficit of $600,000,000,000.[6] That is what the budget worked out to be last year, but President Obama originally proposed $4,150,000,000,000.[7] It is fascinating as well to observe that this ever ratcheting spending is essentially bi-partisan in nature. Whichever party is in power the opposition always brings up the debt as an issue while their supporters downplay it. For instance, PBS launched a documentary on the national debt in early 2009 highlighting especially the spending of George W. Bush.[8] They did not do a follow up documentary when Obama doubled the debt by the end of his term. At the same time, Republicans nary said a word about Bush’s spending, yet lambasted Obama and his spending spree. This trend can also be seen in terms of what is termed “infrastructure spending” or “bailouts.” Republicans howled when Obama went through with his “bailouts” and “infrastructure spending,” yet are oddly silent when Donald Trump proposed a $1,000,000,000,000 program to repair highways and interstates.[9] Vice-versa for the Democrats. Each party only cares about government spending as an issue when they can leverage it for political gain, yet every year the spending goes up and up and up.
Yet the cancerous growth of government cannot solely be blamed upon the men and women inside the government itself; so many are merely doing their jobs. Further, we cannot lay blame solely upon the people who make the “big decisions,” the President, the Congress, the Courts. While we are not a democracy (thank God), our officials are still nevertheless beholden to the people who elected them, and as it turns out the people that we see subverting the American Revolution in the halls of power have been given that opportunity by us the voters and the wider culture generally.
Consistently we can observe throughout popular culture a trend towards authoritarianism. Always a desire for bigger and larger government to “provide” for us. A strong father, a caring mother all in the form of an over-bearing and over-weaning welfare-warfare state. But we very rarely see the ideas of conservatism, libertarianism, or small government represented positively. I like to believe that the wider culture does not have an influence upon my thought process but that would be an arrogant mistake; culture affects everyone, perhaps not equally.
The adoration of Communism and Socialism in the name of freedom throughout popular culture, the best example of which that I own being a novel by Jack London: “The cry of this army is: ‘No quarter! We want all that you possess. We will be content with nothing less than all that you possess. We want in our hands the reins of power and the destiny of mankind. Here are our hands. They are strong hands. We are going to take your government, your palaces, and all your purpled ease away from you, and in that day you shall work for your bread even as the peasant in the field or the starved and runty clerk in your metropolises.”[10] You see similar adoration in films like Elysium. While it might seem that there is a disconnect between culture and politics, as the late great Andrew Breitbart put it: “Politics is downstream from culture.”[11]
Look at the Occupy Wall Street “movement” 6 years ago, there is a wealth of video evidence from the OWS protesters that they very clearly have Statist desires and goals. What Jean-Francois Revel characterized as “The Totalitarian Temptation.”[12] They claim to fight for freedom but in reality wish to smash what currently exists in order to seize power for themselves. You can look to Adam Kokesh’s interactions with OWS,[13] or to Peter Schiff’s wonderful interactions with the protesters.[14] Or when former Soviet Citizen Vladimir Jaffe went and talked to those protesters, among some of the people he spoke to some persons who supported North Korea and attempted to explain away the starvation in that country by blaming “western imperialism.”[15]
Many are so very eager to abandon the individual freedom that the American Revolution fought for. Merely read Chapter 23 “The Coming Revolt of the Guards” in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.[16] Zinn, among many thinkers and average people in the United States today, fall into the trap of utopianism all totalitarian movements have sprung from. The paradise that he describes in this chapter would shackle people to each other, it would sap individuals of any and all will to succeed, why should they after all if their extra labor gets them no reward? It will enslave people, regardless of whether or not they wanted it, to the State. It will steal the wealth of individuals at the point of a gun for the good of a supposed majority. Demagogues use utopian ideals to assert their own power. Zinn’s “Utopia” would sever all lines of communication and plunge us into a new dark age with little to no innovation; fundamentally betraying the ideals that the American Revolutionaries fought for.
Overall 67% of Americans in the United States do not believe the government should prohibit speech considered to be offensive. 70% of Gen Xers, 71% of Baby Boomers, and 80% of the Silent Generation support the freedom of speech in the United States. However, 40% of Millennials believe that the government should be able to prevent people from saying things considered to be offensive.[17] While 40% is a minority, it is certainly a significant minority, The Far Left is also a significant minority; a very vocal and ultimately influential minority. We can only hope that the adage is true that people become more conservative as they grow older (at the very least that applies to my grandparents). We must hope this is true since Republicans were 17 percentage points more likely to support free speech than their Democrat counterparts.
The counter-argument for what I just wrote has popped up from time to time on my radar and essentially it boils down to the idea that “hate speech” cannot be considered to be “free speech.” These liberals claim that they do favor free speech but only insofar as it does not allow for “hate speech.”
As Roanna Carleton-Taylor puts it in her blogpost on the Huffington Post: “Both myself and Resisting Hate strongly believe that hate speech is not free speech. Free speech is not the holy grail of civil liberty. No human being exists in a vacumn [sic] where they can speak as they please with no regard for the consequences of what they are saying. Too often we hear of the right to freedom of speech with rarely a mention of the responsibilities. Yet we do have a responsibility in our speech. We have a responsibility not to harm others, incite hate against them or to create a society of prejudice and intolerance.”[18]
Perhaps it is a tenable argument, but what I have noticed is that the liberals who put forward such an argument do not answer one essential question: “Who gets to decide what is and what is not hate speech?” Did Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama engage in “hate speech” when they endorsed the traditional view of marriage in 2008? Does the government itself get to decide what is hate speech?
Related to the previous question liberals do not answer the question: “who should be given the authority to make that decision and the ability to use force to impose that standard on the public as a whole?”
But from Roanna’s blog I want to pull out one particular quote that is incredibly disturbing: “Free speech is not the holy grail of civil liberty.” That comment in particular, endorsed by The Huffington Post, brings to mind the work of F.A. Hayek:
“What are the fixed poles now which are regarded as sacrosanct, which no reformer dare touch, since they are treated as the immutable boundaries which must be respected in any plan for the future? They are no longer the liberty of the individual, his freedom of movement, and scarcely that of speech. They are protected standards of this or that group…injustices inflicted on individuals by government action in the interest of a group are disregarded with an indifference hardly distinguishable from callousness; and the grossest violations of the most elementary rights of the individual…”[19]
The modern day Liberal, in fact the modern American, is more and more willing to violate the rights of others in the name of “protecting” particular groups of people; for the liberal democrat this conviction ultimately is solely for the purposes of political and electoral gain.
This is more evidence of an ongoing cultural shift, a trend that fundamentally redefines concepts and ideas over and over again to the point that they no longer mean what they originally meant. They reach the opposite of their definition. Truly New Speak is Double Plus Good.
For instance, a Harvard University survey polled adults aged 18-29 and found that 51% of those that responded did not support Capitalism. Of those that responded 33% supported Socialism.[20] One of the pollsters involved in the study noted how the results of the survey connote a change in perception for the upcoming generation, Zach Lustbader noted that “The word ‘capitalism’ doesn’t mean what it used to.”[21] Again, we see that what is considered to be “freedom” in the zeitgeist of the country has shifted dramatically.
These are the reasons that the Fourth of July fill me with such mixed emotions; I feel proud of what happened in the past, and I fear about the state of our country; our morals, our freedoms; in the future. Studying history one tends to see patterns and trends, almost everything seems cyclical. As Stefan Molyneux once said, “History is the same story but with different costumes.”[22] How can one possibly hope to stand like King Lear screaming against the storm that does not care for his protests. Perhaps there is nothing to do to prevent the demise of American freedom.
John Adams once wrote:
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[23]
At the same time that I feel this pessimism, I also feel some hope, particularly when I had the opportunity to remind myself of what the Revolutionaries went through to achieve independence. When I reread the words of the Founding Fathers. There is a possibility that we can continue into the future and regain at least some of the freedoms we have lost through the erosion of time and culture.
The key to the future is remembering the past.
As we close this reflection I leave you with an excerpt perhaps the greatest and most succinct piece of Libertarian philosophy ever put to paper, a document that forever changed the history of the world, a key part of our past, and, perhaps, a beacon of hope for the future of freedom. The Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson in the summer of 1776.
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”[24]
Stay Sane.
Works Cited
“2017 Index of Economic Freedom.” The Heritage Foundation. 2017. http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
Allen, John Lawrence. “ We Pledge Our Lives, Our Fortunes, and Our Sacred Honor.” July 4, 2014. The Blaze. http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/we-pledge-our-lives-our-fortunes-and-our-sacred-honor/
“The American Form of Government.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VogzExP3qhI&t=1s
“Assassin’s Creed 3—Rise Trailer [UK].” July 4, 2012. Assassin’s Creed UK. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Boy11rMf50Q
“Benjamin Franklin.” Goodreads. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4822-we-must-all-hang-together-or-assuredly-we-shall-all
Carleton-Taylor, Roanna. “Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech.” March 23, 2017. The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/roanna-carletontaylor/hate-speech-is-not-free-s_b_15561576.html
Crews, Wayne & Ryan Young. “The Towering Federal Register.” May 21, 2013. The Daily Caller. http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/21/the-towering-federal-register/
Crovitz, Gordon. “You Commit Three Felonies A Day.” Sept. 27, 2009. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438900830760842
Delisle, Elizabeth Cove et. al. “The Federal Budget Deficit for 2010.” Oct. 7, 2010. Congressional Budget Office. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/25107
Dice, Mark. “Americans Don’t Know WHY We Celebrate the 4th of July or WHAT COUNTRY We Declared Independence From!” July 1, 2013. Mark Dice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRkFDcX_72c
Ehrenfreund, Max. “A Majority of Millenials Now Reject Capitalism, Poll Shows.” April 26, 2016. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/26/a-majority-of-millennials-now-reject-capitalism-poll-shows/?utm_term=.8d87b8172120
“The Federal Budget in 2016: An Infographic.” Feb. 8, 2017. Congressional Budget Office. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52408
Foner, Eric. Voices of Freedom. 3rd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2011.
Hayek, F.A. ed. Bruce Caldwell. The Road to Serfdom. London: University of Chicago Press. 2007.
Higgs, Robert. “How FDR Made the Depression Worse.” Feb. 1, 1995. The Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/how-fdr-made-depression-worse
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“The HMS Jersey.” The History Channel. http://www.history.com/topics/american-revolution/the-hms-jersey
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[3] “US Debt Clock.” http://www.usdebtclock.org/
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[8] “Ten Trillion and Counting.” March 24, 2009. PBS: Frontline. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/tentrillion/
[9] Holtz-Eakin, Doug. “Trump’s Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Plan—Jobs Boost or Giveaway?” June 13, 2017. CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/13/opinions/trump-infrastructure-economy-opinion-holtz-eakin/index.html
[10] London, Jack. The Iron Heel. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. 1907. p. 55.
[11] Meyers, Lawrence. “Politics Really Is Downstream From Culture.” Aug. 2, 2011. Breitbart. http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2011/08/22/politics-really-is-downstream-from-culture/
[12] Revel, Jean-Francois. trans. David Hapgood. “The Totalitarian Temptation.” Goodreads. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/245408.The_Totalitarian_Temptation
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[15] Jaffe, Vladimir. “Former Soviet Citizen Confronts Socialists at Occupy Wall Street (Part 1, full version).” Oct. 28, 2011. Vladimir Jaffe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD5luu_UTzc
[16] Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins. 2003. pp. 631-641.
[17] Poushter, Jacob. “Millennials OK with Limiting Speech Offensive to Minorities.” Nov. 20, 2015. Pew Research. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millennials-ok-with-limiting-speech-offensive-to-minorities/
[18] Carleton-Taylor, Roanna. “Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech.” March 23, 2017. The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/roanna-carletontaylor/hate-speech-is-not-free-s_b_15561576.html
[19] Hayek, F.A. ed. Bruce Caldwell. The Road to Serfdom. London: University of Chicago Press. 2007. p. 218.
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[21] Ehrenfreund, Max. “A Majority of Millenials Now Reject Capitalism, Poll Shows.”
[22] Molyneux, Stefan. “Stefan Molyneux Quotes.” Goodreads. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1295690-history-is-the-same-story-with-different-costumes
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[24] Jefferson, Thomas. “The Declaration of Independence.” Harvard Classics. vol. 43 “American Historical Documents.” New York: P. F. Collier & Son. 1910. pp. 160-61.
[1] Paine, Thomas. The American Crisis. New York: Barnes & Noble. 2010. p. 1.
[2] “The American Form of Government.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VogzExP3qhI&t=1s
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[3] “Assassin’s Creed 3—Rise Trailer [UK].” July 4, 2012. Assassin’s Creed UK. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Boy11rMf50Q
[4] “Benjamin Franklin.” Goodreads. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4822-we-must-all-hang-together-or-assuredly-we-shall-all
[5] “The Patriot—The Final Charge.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1vWK2yf9Y0
[6] Rogoway, Tyler. “The Revolutionary War: By the Numbers.” July 4, 2014. Foxtrot Alpha. http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-revolutionary-war-by-the-numbers-1600199390
[7] Marsh, Alan. “POWs in American History: A Synopsis.” National Parks Service. 1998. https://www.nps.gov/ande/learn/historyculture/pow_synopsis.htm
[8] “The HMS Jersey.” The History Channel. http://www.history.com/topics/american-revolution/the-hms-jersey
[9] Dice, Mark. “Americans Don’t Know WHY We Celebrate the 4th of July or WHAT COUNTRY We Declared Independence From!” July 1, 2013. Mark Dice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRkFDcX_72c
[10] Lynd, Staughton. Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism. New York: Vintage Books. 1968. p. 18.
[11] Foner, Eric. Voices of Freedom. 3rd ed. John Winthrop. “Speech to the Massachusetts General Court (1645).” New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2011. p. 29.
[12] Foner, Eric. Voices of Freedom. 3rd ed. James Winthrop. “On the Anti-Federalist Argument (1787).” New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2011. pp. 120 & 123.
[13] Rossiter, Clinton ed. The Federalist papers. New York: Penguin Group. 2003. p. 306.
[14] Ketcham, Ralph ed. The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates. New York: Penguin Books. 2003. p. 75.
[15] Ketcham, Ralph ed. The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates. New York: Penguin Books. 2003. p. 316.
[16] Kehr, Webster. “Quotes: Founding Fathers and Presidents.” March 26, 2017. The Cancer Tutor. https://www.cancertutor.com/quotes_presidents/
[17] Kehr, Webster. “Quotes: Founding Fathers and Presidents.” March 26, 2017. The Cancer Tutor. https://www.cancertutor.com/quotes_presidents/
[18] Rand, Ayn. ed. Harry Binswanger. The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism From A to Z. New York: Meridian Books. 1988. p. 13.
[19] Allen, John Lawrence. “ We Pledge Our Lives, Our Fortunes, and Our Sacred Honor.” July 4, 2014. The Blaze. http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/we-pledge-our-lives-our-fortunes-and-our-sacred-honor/
[20] “The Patriot. Quotes.” IMDb. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0187393/quotes
[21] Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins. 2003. p. 100.
[22] Woods, Thomas E. Jr. “Teddy Roosevelt and the Origins of the Modern Welfare-Warfare State.” March 1, 2004. Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/teddy-roosevelt-and-origins-modern-welfare-warfare-state
[23] Zinn. p. 165.
[24] Higgs, Robert. “How FDR Made the Depression Worse.” Feb. 1, 1995. The Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/how-fdr-made-depression-worse
[25] Higgs.
[26] Lindquist, Rick. “History of U.S. Employer-Provided Health Insurance—post World War II. June 5, 2014. Zane Benefits. https://www.zanebenefits.com/blog/part-1-the-history-of-u.s.-employer-provided-health-insurance-post-world-war-ii
[27] Traynor, Ben. “Roosevelt’s Gold Confiscation: Could it Happen Again?” April 3, 2013. The Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/gold/9968494/Roosevelts-gold-confiscation-could-it-happen-again.html
[28] Mariotti, Steve. “When Owning Gold Was Illegal in America: And Why It Could Be Again.” June 27, 2016. The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-mariotti/when-owning-gold-was-ille_b_10708196.html
[29] Reel, A. Frank. “When a Switch in Time Saved Nine.” Nov. 10, 1985. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/10/opinion/l-when-a-switch-in-time-saved-nine-143165.html
[30] “2017 Index of Economic Freedom.” The Heritage Foundation. 2017. http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking