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To: Ohioan
If you are defining Libertarian as meaning "a lover of liberty" then I agree that the founders were such.

One of the significant events which finally tipped the balance toward drafting the constitution was the Shays Rebellion which was essentially a demand by farmers in W. Mass to the state to pass laws abrogating their debt. States repeatedly passed laws undermining contracts and giving debtor relief during the preconstitution era. This was one of the greatest national problems and led to the constitutional demand to stop such practices.

While it was possible in the past to escape to the west laws in the civilized states were horridly oppressive: people were taxed to pay for churchs, vagrancy laws restricted freedom of movement, personal morals watched and punished when out of the norm, blacks could not own guns or vote, women could not vote and had no standing in court, whites could be drafted to the Slave Patrols, mails were searched and offensive material removed, people were tarred and feathered for their opinions, newspapers were destroyed in the south for being abolitionist and taken from the mails, literature was censored and removed from the mails, voting was highly restricted. The myth of greater freedom (other than for slaveowners and the rich) was just a myth swallowed hook, line and sinker by those preferring to ignore the facts of history.

134 posted on 06/03/2002 2:53:22 PM PDT by justshutupandtakeit
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To: justshutupandtakeit
Your beef with early America is really with our more Conservative society then. When you equate freedom with the suffrage, you make a monster leap. Personal freedom and the suffrage are two very different things. One involves the lack of restraint upon the exercise of free will--so long as you do not injure another (i.e. fail to exercise personal responsibility for your conduct). The other involves an egalitarian pursuit of universal suffrage. We have already noted that Libertarianism is a contending ideology against Egalitarianism. They are eternally in conflict.

As for the taxing to support State Churches, that was far less onerous than the present tax burden to support a Welfare State. One of the most revealing passages in Jefferson's Notes On The State of Virginia, written shortly before he persuaded the State Legislature to adopt religious freedom, shows how Welfare was administered through the Church in Virginia. It is worth reading. (You can find the passage quoted almost in its entirety in A Constitutional Overview.)

I find your comments about the slaveowners and the rich, far too redolent of the class antagonism promoted by the Socialist world over the past 200 years, for me to dignify it as a serious point. Perhaps you also reject the whole of Western Theology, because at its root is the Law written down by Moses after he came down from Mt. Sinai, which deals at some length with rules governing the practice of bondage, and rules protecting the acquisition and enjoyment of wealth? Your complaint is really a much broader attack on the human past than just on those Americans whose willingness to sacrifice everything, made your good life today possible.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

135 posted on 06/03/2002 3:16:42 PM PDT by Ohioan
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