Libertarian ping.To be added or removed from my ping list freepmail me or post a message here
Posted on 07/15/2006 12:43:43 PM PDT by wagglebee
Father Sirico of the Acton Institute spoke on Saturday and I found what he said interesting, for as much what he didn’t say as for what he did. As a Catholic Father one would expect him to be rather preachy but he wasn’t unless pressed on the matter of faith. His main focus was consistently on the importance of Liberty.
What I found particularly interesting was when he recounted his personal history and how at one time in his youth he was an atheist, socialist activist. He said that if there was a demonstration somewhere if he wasn’t leading it he was a part of it.
This experience parallels the experience of so many I run across in this liberty, free-market, think-tank world. Many of us, my self included, started out as well-trained liberals who through logic and experience came to understand that THAT world (the liberal one) is wrong. That using government to dictate the action and outcomes of people, businesses, corporations and institutions isn’t just wrong, it is extra-ordinarily inefficient. Individual freedom is really the best way to accomplish all of these things. Sometimes it takes a lot of experience to realize this truth.
Lord Acton, who the Acton Institute that Father Sirico runs is named after, is responsible for one of the most quoted phrases known, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." This is what most people remember.
The whole quote is more instructive though, “"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end ... liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition ... The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
The important difference is that it starts with the subject “Liberty.” And Lord Acton had something to say about this as well, “Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.”
This is the heart of the concept of morality and was the subject that I wish Father Sirico had spoken more about and only touched peripherally in answer to a question. The relationship between morality and Liberty.
Without Liberty a person cannot be truly moral. It order to be moral one must be free to make the choice. If the state is taking all your money for the “public welfare” and giving it to others to provide for their sustenance then what is left over to practice “charity?”
If the state dictates your every action, all of your behavior, then what choice remains in which to act in a “moral” manner? There is none. If a person decides to fight the state in order to unfetter individuals to live in liberty then that is a moral act, no matter what the state might say.
This is the conundrum that all people must face. To follow the law, since it is supposed to be moral to follow the law, or to follow Liberty, since there can be no morality without Liberty.
Thus, in the final analysis, advocating individual Liberty is the most moral choice there is. It leaves other people free to choose the course of their own lives and every individual to figure out what he or she “ought” to do.
The beauty of Liberty is not only is it the most moral system ever devised, it is also the most efficient. Never has any system ever produced as much prosperity as Freedom, as has Liberty. We need to remind ourselves of this everyday of the year, not just on our national birthday.
Without Liberty a person cannot be truly moral. It order to be moral one must be free to make the choice.
And the left wants to destroy both liberty and morality.
DISCUSSION ABOUT:
The Importance of Liberty
This is a wonderful commentary on liberty and morality!
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Great post...Thanks!
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The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms and false reasoning is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges.
You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice.
Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, 1775
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. ... But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
LOL! I could do this all day.
Man... those guys could WRITE!
:-)
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That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.
Thomas Jefferson, Rights of British America, 1774
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[T]he laws of nature. . . of course presupposes the existence of a God, the moral ruler of the universe, and a rule of right and wrong, of just and unjust, binding upon man, preceding all institutions of human society and government.
John Quincy Adams
If only more people understood the "We the People" grant government IT'S powers and We prohibit government from interfering with Our Rights and Freedoms, then we might find ourselves living in the perfect Union that our Founding Fathers were willing to sacrifice everything to insure us.
Adam's pen ran riot with sarcasm and irritation; in a letter to Jefferson he prepared himself to defend the idea of God by this prologue:
No man is more sensible than I am of the service to science and letters, Humanity, Fraternity and Liberty, that would have been rendered by the Encyclopedists and Economists, by Voltaire, D'Alembert, Buffon, Diderot, Rousseau, LaLande, Frederick and Catherine, if they had possessed common sense. But they were all totally destitute of it. They all seemed to think that all Christendom was convinced as they were, that all religion was "visions Judaiques," and that their effulgent lights had illuminated all the world. They seemed to believe, that whole nations and continents had been changed in their principles, opinions, habits, and feeling, by the sovereign grace of their almighty philosophy, almost as suddenly as Catholics and Calvinists believe in instantaneous conversion. They had not considered the force of early education on the millions of minds who had never heard of their philosophy. And what was their philosophy? Atheism; pure, unadulterated Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, Frederick, De La Lande and Grimm, were indubitable Atheists. The universe was matter only, and eternal; sprit was a word without meaning; liberty was a word without a meaning. There was no liberty in the universe; liberty was a word void of sense. Every thought, word, passion, sentiment, feeling, all motion, and action was necessary. All beings and attributes were of eternal necessity; conscience, morality were all nothing but fate.
... We all curse Robespierre and Bonaparte, but were they not both such restless, vain, extravagant animals as Diderot and Voltaire? Voltaire was the greatest literary character, and Bonaparte the greatest military character of the eighteenth century. There is all the difference between them. Both equally heroes and equally cowards.
John Adams (Jefferson's Philosophical Beliefs)
Amen!
Sadly, most Americans will live their entire lives and never understand or appreciate the birthright the Founders sacrificed so much to leave us.
Who exactly do you think Adams was going to 'defend his idea of God' to?
Certainly not Jefferson. While not in lock-step with the church, Jefferson did admit to being a Christian.
Thomas Jefferson- Letter to Charles Thomson (January 9, 1816) :
A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw.
"Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
"All good government is and must be republican. But at the same time, you can or will agree with me, that there is not in lexicography a more fraudulent word... Are we not, my friend, in danger of rendering the word republican unpopular in this country by an indiscreet, indeterminate, and equivocal use of it? [...] Whenever I use the word republic with approbation, I mean a government in which the people have collectively, or by representation, an essential share in the sovereignty... the republican forms in Poland and Venice are much worse, and those of Holland and Bern very little better, than the monarchical form in France before the late revolution."
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
(Note: Adams understood that the United States is a constitutional republic and NOT a democracy.)
And from Jefferson:
"Does the government fear us? Or do we fear the government? When the people fear the government, tyranny has found victory. The federal government is our servant, not our master!"
Another good point by Adams. The second most quoted source of the Founders was a treatise by the French aristocrat Baron de Montesquieu. His writing took 20 years to complete and was a detailed explanation of almost every type of government imaginable...including, of course, the Republican kind:
Of the Simplicity of Criminal Laws in different Governments
In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments:
in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.
THE SPIRIT OF LAWS Book VI By Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
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"Does the government fear us? Or do we fear the government? When the people fear the government, tyranny has found victory. The federal government is our servant, not our master!"
Jefferson was a brilliant man and a master of the English language.
The concept in your quote is actually a common-law addage- 'That which you create, you have the right to control'
This is in Blackstone's Commentaries of the Laws of England which were annotated for the Constitution by George Tucker in a booklet called View of the Constitution. He is frequently referred to as the 'American Blackstone'.
It is also why we are 'endowed by our Creator' with our rights. That direct Creation by a Supreme Being is what puts us above government.
Government is our servant because WE created IT.
This concept is lost on contemporary Americans. So many are used to thinking that government has the legitimate authority to control them that the legitimacy of that authority is never questioned.
"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
"The federal government has taken too much tax money from the people, too much authority from the states, and too much liberty with the Constitution."
"Nations crumble from within when the citizenry asks of government those things which the citizenry might better provide for itself."
"Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem."
LOL!
And right on target...every one!
Libertarian ping.To be added or removed from my ping list freepmail me or post a message here
Thank you.
I am forced to repost the most incisive language out of a duty to truth:
"Without Liberty a person cannot be truly moral. It order to be moral one must be free to make the choice. If the state is taking all your money for the “public welfare” and giving it to others to provide for their sustenance then what is left over to practice “charity?”
If the state dictates your every action, all of your behavior, then what choice remains in which to act in a “moral” manner? There is none..."
And the morally pious destroy liberty in their definition of morality.
Adams tried for several years to prove to Jefferson that Voltaire was a pig. Jeffeson did not figure it out until he was almost dead.
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