Posted on 03/28/2007 10:08:21 AM PDT by K-oneTexas
Is the American Experiment Dead? by Helen E. Krieble Posted 03/16/2007
King George III would be so proud. He and his aristocratic friends laughed at America’s quaint “experiment” with self-government. To them it was unthinkable that common people were enlightened enough to rule themselves. Today that experiment is the envy of a world where people in fewer than 100 countries live under democratic governments. Yet here in the United States, old King George may yet be right.
Astonishingly, today’s Americans expect government to care for us from cradle to grave, the way commoners once expected a benevolent king to care for his subjects. We treat people as members of groups rather than as individuals, insidiously devolving into the very class system against which the founders rebelled. In a deeply disturbing sense, Americans are voluntarily surrendering the very freedoms that millions fought and died to establish and protect. James Garfield once said the most common form of death in politics is suicide. After a noble 225 year history, is the American experiment dying at the hands of its own people?
Many of the “long train of abuses” that led to our rebellion from the British Crown in 1776 are eerily similar to our own government’s excesses. The Declaration of Independence listed a host of grievances against the King that are all too familiar today. The authors accused the King of refusing “his assent to laws… necessary for the public good,” of forbidding locals to pass laws “of immediate and pressing importance,” even of dissolving local representative bodies. How different is that from today’s “supreme” federal system that routinely over-rides local and state laws, especially by federal court orders and “constitutional” rulings based on premises not in the Constitution? The Crown had “obstructed the administration of justice” by controlling judges’ tenure and salaries; today’s government does so by empowering judges to usurp legislative powers -- to make up new laws rather than interpret laws passed by the people’s representatives. It is a more modern technique, but with the same anti-democratic result.
King George had “erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” In 2007 the federal government has more than 4 million employees and costs taxpayers almost 3 trillion dollars a year. The King “combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution,” much as modern leaders compromise our sovereignty to institutions like the UN, international courts, and foreign trade commissions.
The founders said government should protect private property, but today’s Supreme Court lets government take private property and sell to developers, take away the value of land by denying the right to use it, and force landowners to give their land for endangered species habitat, parks, trails, and “open space.” The first “inalienable right” in our Declaration was the right to life, but today’s courts prohibit states from protecting it. If we still believe “all men are created equal,” how can we justify racial preferences in school admission, government contracts and congressional re-apportionment? Freedom of speech is central to the Bill of Rights, but Congressmen now deny that right to those who want to speak about them, or other candidates, like politically correct thought police.
“The policy of the federal government,” wrote President Jefferson, “is to leave her citizens free -- neither aiding nor restraining them in their pursuits.” Today, we are not allowed to plan our own retirement, design our own health insurance, or even devise our own children’s education. The endless intrusion reaches every facet of our lives from where we can hike in the woods to how our hamburgers must be cooked. Both parties instinctively look to government as the first answer to all problems. Even Republicans propose solving issues like illegal immigration by hiring 30,000 new federal employees.
There is one crucial difference: unlike our colonial ancestors, contemporary Americans voluntarily agreed to all these usurpations with their votes. We have been warned frequently to be alert. In 1835 Tocqueville wrote, “the American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.” Sadly, that day has long since come.
We are left with an unresponsive government millions of Americans do not recognize as theirs, or feel moral obligation to support. That trend could be the death knell of the founders’ ideas. It is not too late to rediscover our “experiment” in self-government, but Americans must first decide whether they care.
Ms. Krieble is president of the Vernon K. Krieble Foundation. Information on the plan is available at www.krieble.org
If Ms. Krieble believes we're a lost cause, there are thousands of travel agents who would gladly send her to one of the "democratic governments" of her choosing.
If you poke my "dead" America with a stick to see if it is truly dead, don't cry when you pull back a stump instead of a hand!
LLS
Yes, it is. I knew it was dead the day I saw IRS whistleblowers testify before Congress with electronically scrambled voices and covers over their heads.
Yes - It happened when "we the people" forgot the proper role of government; to protect the un-aleinable rights of a free people.
The American Experiment is not dead and neither is America.
We have weathered a Civil War; we have fought off foreign invaders; we have met every challenge that has ever confronted us. Today's trials and problems are no different. Americans will prevail and America will have weathered another attempt at its destruction. We will not fail because it is not in our makeup to fail.
Today's challenge is Liberals and the enemy from within. It may take several decades but we will prevail.
I don't believe that it is the point she is trying to make. What she says is that we are slowly becoming like those same "democratic governments" that you refer to in your post.
Many in this country, including politicians and GW, believe in the perfidious idea of globalism i.e. all existing nations reaching a social and political equilibrium. None of them aspire to become like us, so that means that we have to become like them. And that is exactly what is happening, rapidly.
I'd be curious to see her ranking of these "democracies."
RE: After a noble 225 year history, is the American experiment dying at the hands of its own people?
Yes. Two ways out, else, something bad (such as caeserdom or conquest from without) ensues:
1) CW2 - wherein, real patriots put down the Left and perhaps even divide the country physically, ending up with Left / bread and circuses and Right / individual responsibility dominated zones with a national border between them
2) De-democratization - examples - go back to Senators elected by state legislatures, voting qualifications, stricter citizenship tests, greater executive power, etc
yes
Yes, its dead. The "patriots" will screech otherwise, all the while shackling themselves to the State.
So those who think that the purpose of government is to ensure the rights and freedoms of a person rather than to administer every aspect of his life (with his own money) should leave the U.S. rather than stick up for the principles it was founded on?
No - if they think there's a better democracy out somewhere else, they should move there instead of bitching above how bad it is here. And if not, they should get off their asses and try to change the USA for the better instead of bitching about how bad they have it here.
It is very ill, but I don't think it is dead. . .yet.
One of the problems in changing the way things are now is the fact that most people are completely oblivious to the fact that there even IS a problem.
They were correct to think so.
Is the American Experiment Dead?
NO!
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