By By Bill Frezza
Why do we still celebrate
Independence Day? Is it a lingering habit, a mindless bit of nostalgia, a time
to indulge in fireworks and barbecues, devoid of any deeper meaning? Can anyone
honestly argue that our nation still honors the values, or practices the
principles, for which our Founders fought?
Today, most Americans have
been trained to be embarrassed by the “extremist” individualist ethos that made
the protection of liberty the primary purpose of government. They have been
taught to apologize for the shortcomings of the “rich white men” who led the
revolution. A majority of Americans now subscribe to an expansive view of
government as both great provider and beneficent leveler. Its primary purpose
is to redress unequal or unhappy outcomes, regardless of their source, through
wealth redistribution on a scale so vast that it mocks the concept “private
property.”
As for the causes of revolution, we’ve lost sight of them, too. King George III was a champion of laissez-faire compared to the modern cradle-to-grave entitlement state. The swollen capital city named after the man who won our freedom now claims the prize for erecting “a Multitude of new offices” bent on sending out “Swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” If there is a field of endeavor that the federal government does not yet regulate, subsidize, or penalize, just wait. A new law is only a “crisis” away.
Have these new offices been
imposed on us by some malevolent force that has undermined the workings of
democracy? No. We the people ceaselessly demand new offices at an accelerating
rate. The majority of Americans vote as if they believe that massive new
government programs— created by incomprehensibly complex laws and administered
by increasingly unaccountable bureaucrats—can solve an expanding array of
“problems” which our Founders would have surely concluded were the proper
province of civil society and not the sovereign state.
The King was criticized for
unjustly imprisoning seamen. Today, our federal and state governments imprison
more of our fellow citizens than any totalitarian regime in history—the vast
majority for violating a futile prohibition on the possession, sale, or consumption
of substances our Founders would not have thought twice about. Vast portions of
our youth are thus rendered permanently unemployable, branded as felons and
outcasts with nowhere to turn but a life of crime. And yet we persist in this
folly, unable to admit that drug prohibition has been as huge a failure as
alcohol prohibition.
And taxes? The Founders knew a
tax when they saw one—and there were very few they could abide, with or without
representation. Thanks to a Supreme Court that long ago gave up defending the
Constitution, we now have a chameleon levy that is not a tax when politically
inconvenient yet magically becomes a tax when seeking constitutional muster. As
if we didn’t have a wide enough variety of taxes, this new tax is designed to penalize
anyone who refuses to participate in a great communal project designed to make
every citizen even more deeply dependent on the government.
Little by little, the home of
the brave and the land of the free has become a nation of rent-seeking dependents
clamoring for their share of state largess. Even before the latest entitlement
blowout called Obamacare, we crossed the line where more than half of Americans
receive some kind of assistance from the government every month, paid for by
the fewer than half that still pay income taxes. As we move into the future and
the number of dependents grows while the taxpayer pool shrinks, we call the
result social justice rather than its old name: theft.
Our forefathers shed blood
rather than render unto King George. Yet today we madly mortgage our nation’s
future to foreign powers, piling debt upon debt without limit or thought as to
how it will be repaid. These debts ensnare our children and grandchildren even
as we stop having them, confident in the knowledge that the government will
take care of us in our old age, so why bother with the trouble and expense?
If we were still a nation
capable of shame with enough intellectual integrity to call things as they are,
if we hadn’t debauched our language as badly as our currency, if we had the
courage to look in the mirror and see how woefully we have squandered our
Founders’ legacy, this Fourth of July would be a day not of celebration but of
atonement.
Give some thought to what we
have lost as we mark another In Dependence Day. May providence have mercy on
our nation, lest we end up getting what we deserve.
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