|
Give me Liberty!
(I'm feeling determined)
This is an excerpt from an incredible speech presented by Lorne Gunter, a columnist at the Edmonton Journal, at a "Conceived in Liberty" gathering on July 4, 2002 which is even more relevant today as our civil rights are being stripped away and the intentions of the Founding Fathers are being mocked with the string of documents Obama is signing, in his position as President, of a once proud nation that understood the meaning of freedom and the fact that government was originally designed to protect the rich from the poor.
SOURCE: http://fathersforlife.org/articles/gunter/liberty.htm
The Declaration of Independence is one of the seminal statements on the natural right to freedom in human history, and the American Revolution one of the seminal acts – perhaps the foremost act – in the long struggle for freedom from repression. To permit their significance and spirit to be lost would be to speed the diminution of freedom everywhere, including here in Canada.
And believe me, the intellectual significance of the American founding is under attack. Everywhere the revisionists are attempting to make us believe that the American War for Independence was not what it appeared to be, that was not a struggle for individual liberty.
Permit me to name three fairly recent books as examples of what I mean: Garry Wills’s A Necessary Evil, Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America, and Richard Matthews’s The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson.
All of these volumes, frankly, are trash, and laughably so. Each seeks to justify some modern perversion of freedom – Marxism, gun control or big government – by insisting the American Founding Fathers were a) collectivist, b) indifferent to right to bear arms or c) not especially suspicious of government.
Matthews’s Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson is the dumbest of this trio and Bellesiles’s Arming America far and away the most fraudulent. But it is Wills’s book, A Necessary Evil, on whether or not Americans possess an innate suspicion of government, that is the most dangerous.
Matthews claims Jefferson was not a Lockean advocate of minimal government, property rights and maximum individual liberty, but rather a prophet for the coming of Karl Marx. At the very least, Matthews sees Jefferson as a sort of Robin Hood of Monticello, entirely in favour of taxing the rich and expropriating their lands to give to the poor.
It is true Jefferson was dubious of the concentration of power in private hands. But it was the concentration of power within government that he feared. He opposed a standing army and a strong federal government, among other manifestations of central power, because he trusted no government institution to keep its mitts off the people’s liberty. He was also among the strongest advocates ever for the virtue of private property.
Yes, I mean the virtue of owning and enjoying property. Jefferson believed deeply that property ownership improved a man’s character and that that improvement was vital to proper functioning of a republican democracy.
I recommend reading the entire speech more than once.
|
