The Three Biggest Issues To Take Total Control

The NAIS laws and the new agriculture regulations that are coming into effect will take control over what we eat. These regulations give total unconstitutional control to the government. This is all in the name of food safety. You and I will not even be able to grow gardens or raise a few chickens on the side. We will need to register with the government, provide a plan of what we intend to grow, set up setbacks to prevent contamination of our gardens, give the government unlimited rights to inspect our property and books, etc. It will be impossible to comply, and the fines for non-compliance are astronomical. These laws and rules are already in effect. Some will say that the NAIS law is voluntary. So is paying income taxes. You volunteer at the point of the government's gun. This is the most dangerous law to me. Folks will put up with a lot as long as their bellies are full. Hungry people are the most dangerous. Starving folks will follow anyone who promises them food.

Practically every thread discusses some additional government program.

Another thread on FR today is a Mark Steyn NRO editorial which contains this commentary on the Left's agenda and the "conservative" response. Steyn observes:

"As I’ve written before, the appeal of this issue to him and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, et al., is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture — one in which elections are always fought on the Left’s issues and on the Left’s terms, and in which “conservative” parties no longer talk about small government and individual liberty but find themselves retreating to one last pitiful rationale: that they can run the left-wing state more effectively than the Left can."

Steyn makes a point here which has been the focus of my posts over the past several weeks. That is this: the debate must not be allowed to focus on the peripheral points around the "issue" of health care, the banks, the auto companies, or any other quibbling over who can run the best program!

The liberty of future generations is now at stake. This is a "principles" matter. The debate must be framed around principles and ideas of liberty versus counterfeit ideas which enslave individuals to big government.

True "conservatives," meaning those who want to conserve and preserve the philosophy and principles the nation was founded upon, must frame the debate, and they must force the Left to debate the ideas of liberty versus the tried-and-failed ideas of government control (tyranny). To do less, dishonors those who were willing to sacrifice their "lives, property, and sacred honor" in order to make a Declaration of Independence from such tyranny and to frame a written "People's" Constitution for limiting government power.

Articulating those ideas and confronting every proposed expansion of government power with the "chains of the Constitution" (Jefferson) may require a new cadre of Congressmen and Senators who actually understand the Founders' ideas. If so, then 2010 may provide opportunity for that.

To use the President's term: conservatives need to reset the debate if they are to regain the advantage. In order to do that effectively, however, they must quickly educate themselves to articulate the foundation and source of their freedom to do so.

"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39

"Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread." --Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:122

So much for home gardens. What happened to the “Victory Gardens” of World War II?

Who knew the simple act of growing potatoes and string beans would be considered to be criminal and treasonous? If for no more reason than that, I would start an orange tree in my back yard, and every bite of one of those orenges would be in defiance of the new oppressive government in Washington.

Michelle would also have to shut down her White House garden patch. Can’t be setting a bad example.

Thanks for your response to my earlier post. If enough citizens will read Levin's "Liberty and Tyranny," consult the dozens of web sites where the writings of America's Founders can be read (sites like Wall Builders, LibertyUSA Foundation, and others) and read other books that identify and trace what has happened to the Founders' ideas (such as "Our Ageless Constitution") see, then perhaps the debate can be reframed in such a way that elected representatives will be forced to stop arguing about who can give us the most "goodies" with the least pain, and begin to actually talk about who can best protect liberty for future generations.

To do that will require what Jefferson called "an informed electorate," however. Articulating the Founders' principles is easier now that they are available online and not buried in some library, away from public view. The "censors" who took them out of the nation's textbooks will have a harder time deleting them from the Internet.

2010 is a good time to begin requiring Republican candidates to be able to debate those ideas or risk losing their offices.

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