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Sometimes you wonder why Americans bothered to celebrate Independence Day last week.
Granted, the fireworks are spectacular, but not nearly as exciting as now forbidden practices like launching lit cherry bombs from slingshots, setting M-80s off under tin cans and tossing silver salutes at passing cars.
And July 4 does offer marketing opportunities -- all
those hot as a firecracker
sales at used-car lots,
assorted cinematic hype and many invitations to visit
mountain towns and spend lots of money.
But what of all that stuff that Thomas Jefferson wrote
in 1776 along with Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of
Happiness
?
Consider some whining published in the May 14, 1997, edition of the Wall Street Journal. Therein a pair of CEOs -- Howard Whetzel and Kenneth Allard -- complained that if you searched the Internet thoroughly, you could discover all manner of security details about nuclear power plants.
The result of this information being available, they
warned, could be theft of radioactive materials and a
devastating attack on American soil
which could result
in permanent, catastrophic damage that could imperil the
nation's power grid.
Naturally, they call for increased security in the form of restrictions on the free exchange of information, but is that what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor?
The sensible response is The level of security you
guys want is utterly incompatible with a free society and a
small, limited government. So don't come to us asking for
help in protecting your toxic enterprise, okay?
Or we might look at the town of Hurst, Texas, near Fort Worth, where 10 families are trying to keep their houses.
There the city government is using its powers of eminent domain to condemn their property -- and not for a highway or the like, but for the expansion of a shopping mall.
Just how did a bigger shopping mall, a private enterprise, became a noble and worthy public purpose? John Boyle, the Hurst city attorney, said the mall produces $11 million in sales tax each year and is the city's primary source of income and jobs.
In other words, only certain people, like millionaire shopping mall owners, have property rights these days. The rest of us get to move if we're in the way of their profits.
Is this the action of a government that derives its
just Powers from the Consent of the Governed
? Or
does it fit better with a long Train of Abuses and
Usurpations
which evinces a Design to reduce them
under absolute Despotism
?
The Founders also criticized George III because the king
was depriving us, in many cases, of the Benefits of
Trial by Jury.
Now consider a little trick sometimes employed by
federal agents pursuing the War on Drugs
(who might
to qualify as Swarms of Officers to harass our
people
). It's called Civil Asset Forfeiture, and I'll
quote from the April, 1997, edition of Harper's
Magazine:
Under the federal asset-forfeiture laws amended by
Congress in 1984 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the
government could seize my house and land and evict my
family from our home without convicting me of any crime,
indeed without so much as charging me with one.... That's
because under the civil-forfeiture statute the standard of
proof is much lower than in a criminal prosecution; the
government need only demonstrate 'probable cause' that my
property was involved in a violation of the drug laws in
order to confiscate it.
Is that the liberty that John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson had in mind 221 years ago? Could they have ever envisioned they were founding a country that would use helicopters to examine what people grew in their gardens? A land where government apparently solely exists to protect nuclear power plants and shopping malls?
The signatures below the Declaration of Independence are those of hemp growers, rum runners, tea-dumping terrorists, smugglers, fomenters of armed revolution -- a rather motley bunch, come to think of it, and certainly an embarrassment to decent, law-abiding people.
Little wonder that we so studiously ignore their beliefs these days -- but if we're going to do that, why bother celebrating the holiday?
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