Don's Tuesday column

               THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   7/02/2013

That freedom shall not perish from this earth

As Independence Day approaches, some revealing, profound concepts beg our attention; they’re not wholly unrelated to the threat, the actuality, of oppression of the freedoms we hold dear, revealed in IRS and other scandals. Freedom and rights as spelled out in our Constitution were, at the time the Colonists began stirring for independence, an evolving rather than a static concept. Those early pioneers, settlers and eventual Founding Fathers did not just wake up one day and formulate the concept of “unalienable rights” endowed “by their Creator.” They read, and intellectually embraced, the beliefs of English and French thinkers who opined on the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God who bestowed upon individuals those rights. Those thinkers and writers on individual freedom and the best means of assuring freedom through governments established among men—were not starting in a vacuum.

Yes, it’s true that people had to live under tyrannical kings and royal lineages. However, I learned from a speaker at a Redding Tea Party Patriots meeting that, over the course of hundreds of years and four separate charters, including the Magna Carta, English kings made compromises to their absolute power over their kingdoms and subjects. Admittedly at the point of a sword held by lesser royalty and landholders, those concessions gave the British people governing bodies and limited rights.

Yes, it’s nearly ancient textbook history but it bears on reality for many of the subjects and lower levels of British life. The king ruled directly over lesser royalty, elsewhere through his/her representatives and tax collectors, while the lives of commoners and trades people, subject to royal whim, proceeded apace.

What the colonists—primarily British, many having chosen indentured servitude to get to the New World—found themselves facing were less freedoms, rights and economic independence than they would have enjoyed as subjects in England. It became intolerable for many, but not all. Certain of the Acts, Laws and taxes were called “the Intolerable Acts,” risible and offensive to the core of those colonists.

Consider that, if memory serves, only around a third of the colonists were committed to waging war for independence. Another third were loyal subjects happily enduring the burdens inflicted by the British monarch, his governors, and the world’s most powerful military. The last third could make their way with neither rebellion against, nor devotion to, the crown. Tyranny, indeed, but King George never set foot in the colonies and the oppression was not universally resented nor considered cause for bloodshed.

Perhaps we can now put current political conflicts in perspective: A sizable plurality finds it quite intolerable that the federal government continues to spend trillions of dollars that this country doesn’t have, borrowing from China or financially enslaving those not yet working or even born. All to sustain the financial and economic lifestyles of the poor, the working poor, the so-called disabled awarded their rights to our pockets by lawyers and judges, and seniors simply abiding by an unsustainable system whereby they consume 3 times the medical care that they ever paid taxes for.

Either many millions of our citizens must be weaned off their dependence upon the fruits of someone’s, heck, everyone else’s labor; either the costly plague of thousands of unnecessary rules and regulations, together with tens of millions of words in a bloated, obscure tax code, are undone; either the federal branch will willingly shed powers not based on the Constitution and restore to the sovereign states their place under that same Constitution—or there will be a new American revolution. To be aware of the extent to which federal governmental apparatus is now using its powers to harass, to demand satisfaction, to investigate and intimidate into submission the otherwise law-abiding but determined opponents of that same government—that awareness places a burden of choice. Whose side are you on?

In “Which Vision for America Will Our New College Graduates Embrace?” (search by title), Charles Kline of Hillsdale College reviewed two commencement addresses: by Senator Ted Cruz and by President Obama. “Cruz began by noting that most people in history have had very little freedom because they have lived under monarchies.” Winning independence from England and writing “a Constitution that enshrined the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” rights that came from God, not government, produced limited government. That has been the story of America, while the free market has been the “engine of prosperity,” allowing many poor to end up rich and many more to better themselves and their families.

Obama’s vision, unsurprisingly, is quite different: “He contended that government needs to be large and has done good things when it has been increased in size … He often mixed individual achievement and governmental achievement as though they were the same thing” with self-government being “the tool to do big and important things together that we could not possibly do alone”, like railroads, electricity, a highway system and education. However, those four examples have for much of our history flourished under private, state or local stewardship; less so under the federal government.

Irreconcilable visions could compete equally in the marketplace of ideas, except that Obama’s side has vast, powerful tools to use against conservative activists, whistleblowers and nosy reporters wishing to expose public misdeeds to public scrutiny. Not good odds for our side.