By Vernon Burns
In Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address, given March 4, 1801, he warned that that if we wandered from our founding principles because of “error or alarm” we should “hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.”
Jefferson also expounded what is the foundational principle of our shared republic, “equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state of persuasion, religious or political….”
Yet, “we the people” are accepting the death of our democratic republic for the false promise of something for nothing. The fruits of someone’s labor, stolen in our name, and given to us as a narcotic—this narcotic, whether given in the spirit of entitlement, subsidy, aid, fairness, investment, welfare or charity in effect makes us all slaves.
Those that receive become more and more dependent on the welfare state, always wanting more from an ever larger and more powerful government. For those in power—the ruling class—this insures the majority of the people depend on the rulers, not themselves, for the control of their very lives. The dependent class becomes slaves asking for more welfare.
For those who wish to pursue happiness on their own terms, neither wanting or expecting anything they have not earned with their own labor, they are forced into the slavery of providing their labor to support the dependent class. The ruling class realized for this system of making the vast majority of the people dependent on them to be instituted, they had to engineer a system with only a very few supporting the whole society. The system they needed was not found in our declaration of independence, our constitution, or the bill of rights, but a plan did exist.
It was written in 1848 by Karl Marx and given to the world as the ‘Communist Manifesto.’ Two of the top requirements are “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax” with the “abolition of all rights of inheritance.” This is the plan to empower those who know best how to apply our individual rights for the greater good. Thank you. If this is not bad enough, our rulers have devised a system to force the self-supporting into dependence themselves, think social security, Medicare and now Obamacare.
Now for the most immoral part of this plan of self-deception, the money that can be taken away from the productive for the dependent, without destroying the source of all income, free enterprise, ran out a long time ago. To cover this shortfall, the funding required to supply the narcotic and keep themselves in power, the ruling class turned to debt a long time ago. At $15 trillion and growing, with over 41 cents of every dollar our government spends being new borrowing, this is a death sentence for our republic. This debt is a pledge, by the ruling class of the world, that our government will confiscate the labor of enough citizens to repay the money required to feed the addictions of today’s welfare state. The only way to escape the effects of this pledge is to be less and less productive and more and more dependent.
Our rulers have turned what Thomas Jefferson call for, “equal and exact justice to all men,” into a system that rewards the dependent for votes and punishes the productive because they, the rulers have the power. Today, 47 percent of our citizens pay no federal income tax, so bear little direct cost of the welfare state. The so-called entitlement programs (social security, unemployment, Medicare, and Obamacare) are structured to insure the majority will receive many times over the money they have contributed.
Medicaid, food stamps, aid to dependent children, and all of the other welfare state good programs are, in most cases, a subsidy from the productive to the nonproductive, so the nonproductive can avoid responsibility for themselves and/or their children and parents.
The welfare of farm subsidies and supports, bailing out favored businesses and unions, corporate subsidies and supports, and loan guaranties, thousand of pages in the tax code to favor those who have the political muscle to get special treatment. The outrage of our federal government supporting regulations, in some states, that force people into labor unions and then the state itself confiscates the people’s money and sends it to the union as dues.
I will stop; I think you see we are not free as Thomas Jefferson envisioned it. We are not treated with “equal and exact justice to all men” or to say, “equal protection under the law,” the corner stone of western civilization and the rights of man. Where did this great concept come from? I will suggest an even greater concept “do unto others as you would have do unto you.”
We must have a rebirth of freedom.
