Terry Paulson has an interesting article on the RightNetwork. It is chock full of wisdom of our fathers, quotes to make you think: Reading this article, I was amazed and dismayed by how far we have diverged from the path which our Founding Fathers had planned for us. The opening paragraph is shocking not for any graphic content or vulgar language, but for the complete acceptance of a lesser condition:
I remember a black physician who shared his own frustration at hearing a young mother on welfare point to her caseworker and say to her child, “That is my case worker. Someday, you’ll have one, too.” Is that now the American Dream?
I go to the grocery store and see the people with their state-funded welfare cards, and it’s not just mothers with children or old folks. I see grown women with grown daughters swiping my tax dollars. I don’t begrudge food to those who need it, but I feel sad for the people who have lost a vision of taking care of themselves, and even more sad for the generations who are raised knowing nothing better, of not having the dignity of being in control of their own lives. Those able-bodied slaves of the state do not realize that they are stealing from the rest of us. They simply do not think of it.
He also had a warning: “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
Unfortunately, America has steadily been drifting from the Constitutional grounding our Founding Fathers established. What started with FDR’s New Deal has now blossomed into a nanny state where our Constitutional rights have been transformed into extensive entitlements.
Not only do they not think of it, it becomes a perceived right:
Columnist Walter Williams has written on the difference between rights and wishes. He asserts: “A right confers no obligation on another. For example, the right to free speech is something we all possess. My right to free speech imposes no obligation upon another except that of non-interference. … Contrast those rights to the supposed right to decent housing or medical care. Those supposed rights do confer obligations upon others. There is no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy. …Your right to decent housing and medical care requires that some other American have less of something else, namely diminished rights to his earnings.”
And by forcing me to hand over my earned dollars to a nanny state to give to the “needy,” my right and my privilege to contribute to charity is taken away, also. But then, to paraphrase a very popular former president, when asked if a certain tax cut would be given to the people, “we don’t know if you’ll spend it right”. Excuse me, sir, but they are my dollars to do with as I please, and if I want to feed a hungry child or go skydiving, it is my right. I do know that I, personally, would donate more to charities I feel comfortable with, if I had more to donate.
This is not to say that helping our neighbor is not a personal moral imperative most Americans feel. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his acclaimed and often quoted Democracy in America in which he praised America and its democratic ideals. Although noting the dangers of individualism, he praised how America was able to balance liberty and equality. He was impressed with America’s self-governing local communities based on self-reliance and mutual cooperation. Tocqueville attributed America’s entrepreneurial spirit that he witnessed to the practice of limited government, but he warned, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”
Read the whole thing. Then weep for what we’ve lost, and regain the determination to get it back.
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