Libertarian Party of Connecticut

R.I.P. THE CONSTITUTION

John White

The dictator of the barnyard in Animal Farm, George Orwell’s satire on totalitarianism, is Napoleon the pig. How appropriate a character to place in that role!

Government is a pig which feeds on your liberty, your property and your privacy. All government officials are potential tyrants. The natural course of unchecked power is totalitarianism by those who govern and slavery for those who are governed. Throughout history, the greatest threat to freedom has come from government because—as George Washington so aptly put it—government is simply organized force.

The Founders of America understood that well. That is why they wisely limited the powers of the federal government to those enumerated in the Constitution, and reserved all other powers to the states and the people. That is also why they amended the Constitution with the Bill of Rights, which specifies the inalienable rights of each citizen, no matter what the government or a majority of the population might otherwise want. In the America of our Flounders, the individual citizen was regarded as sovereign; no monarch, dictator or religious junta rules us. Through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the hard-won liberty and rights of individuals were to be preserved for them and their posterity. Through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, government was to remain forever a servant of the people, not become its master.

However, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance against those who would steal our liberty, our property and our privacy, whether by direct force, coercion or stealthy means. Our liberty, our sovereignty, our rights, our property, our privacy, our justice and our human dignity can only be preserved by an informed, alert electorate who cares and gets involved in the political process. That is the fundamental obligation of citizens of the American republic. Thomas Jefferson put it simply: "We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest—which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves."

We the people are the owners of America, so we have the responsibilities which every owner of an enterprise has. We have to supervise the operation of our country and we have to appoint or elect stewards to represent us in performing the activities necessary to run it.

Sadly, many owners have become derelict in their duty. Their obligations of ownership are being disregarded. Those obligations are, in simplest terms, to understand the principles of our government and our society, to inform ourselves about the issues, and to vote for what our conscience tells us is best for our country.

Instead, voter ignorance and apathy have led to a situation in which our government is largely unchecked and abusive, especially at the federal level. In fact, we no longer have a federal government. Federalism is nearly dead. Instead, we have a national government—collective statism—with power centralized in Washington, D.C. That change has been going on, gradually and incrementally, at least since FDR’s administration. Some place its start as far back as Lincoln’s administration. In any case, it has resulted in a profound—and thoroughly undesirable—change from what the Constitution intends.

The federal government created by the Framers of the Constitution has narrowly defined functions which are limited to national defense and certain matters among the states. The national government created by Destroyers of the Constitution has functions which intrude into every aspect of our lives and federalize matters intended to be left to the states and local communities. Moreover, the Destroyers have created a welfare state which addicts citizens to government handouts and numbs them, intellectually and morally, to the danger of welfarism. Our Founders wanted freedom from government, not dependence on it. Last of all, the national government is rushing us into international pacts and global alliances which undermine our national sovereignty, override the Constitution and bring America into a world government being set up through the United Nations. Under that world government, you can say good-bye to your liberty, your sovereignty, your rights, your property, your justice, your privacy and your freedom of thought.

If government is a pig, in America it has become a wild boar. The IRS is its tusks. The regulatory agencies are its hoofs. With its tusks, it rips away large portions of our wealth and property to feed its insatiable appetite for control via an ever-bloating bureaucracy. With its hooves, it tramples through our lives, smashing our rights and forcing burdensome and costly regulations on our occupational behavior and our personal activities. And to add insult to injury, after confiscating wealth and handcuffing the producers of wealth, it redistributes that wealth, first to itself (via wages, benefits and pensions far better than most congresspeople would ever get in private business) and then to special interest groups who have done nothing to earn it, such as social and corporate welfare, and foreign aid. Perhaps the worst injury of all is this: it steals your life—i.e., the time you need to comply, individually and corporately, with ever-increasing regulations, especially those of the IRS. Tax overpayments can be recovered, but those hours and days of your life required for tax preparation can never be.

The federal government has intruded unconstitutionally into every aspect of our lives—our freedom, our rights, our property, our thoughts, our spiritual life, our human dignity. If America is a family and the government is the head of the family, we are living in a dysfunctional family with abusive parents.

The solution: Scale back the federal govenment to its constitutional limits by voting into office those who will do so and by supporting those people and groups who educate the public about this ever-growing menace to our freedom.

Also bear in mind that our bloated federal government would not be possible without funding. That funding—the blood which keeps the monster alive—comes through taxation, especially the loathsome income tax. It should be eliminated. Insofar as there are legitimate government expenses to be met, only a national sales tax, which is voluntary, befits a free people.

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JOHN WHITE is an author in the fields of spirituality and higher human culture. This essay is drawn from a book in progress, The Pledge of Allegiance & The Star-Spangled Banner: A Patriot’s Primer on the American Spirit. He has published 15 books, including The Meeting of Science and Spirit, What Is Enlightenment? and A Practical Guide to Death and Dying. His books have been translated into ten languages. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Reader's Digest, Esquire, Omni, Woman's Day, The New American and various other newspapers and magazines. He lives in Cheshire, Connecticut.