Posted on 06/24/2011 5:40:23 AM PDT by Steve495
His ignorance of the history of this country and the constitution are astounding to say the least. Not surprising coming from a Time Magazine article.
The title is correct; the article's author misrepresents the Constitution. The author does so out of his ignorance of the nation's history and his ignorance of the Constitution.
America's citizens do not need to share in the author's abject ignorance. The Constitution is readily available to read and "Conservative" sites on the Internet will send anyone a free copy. Does anyone ask why Liberal Internet sites do not make the same offer?
I strongly suggest you read the newly released book, “The Original Argument”, which contains the Constitution. Then compare what you learned with Richard Stengal’s representation of the Constitution.
I seriously doubt Richard Stengel of Time magazine would read this or be able to comprehend it if he did read it but I feel compelled to share it just the same. I truly hope there are very few Americans as ignorant as Richard Stengal but in today’s America, it is possible.
Was it natural resources, no other lands are equally blessed. Was it the people, no, the people who built America came from other elsewhere. Was it government planning and wisdom that spurred our nation to great heights, no again? It wasn’t what government did that made America great, it was what government was preventing from doing that made the difference. What set America apart from other lands was freedom for the individual, freedom to work, to produce, to succeed, and especially to keep the fruits of one’s labors. American became great precisely because America prevented the stifling effect of too much government.
However, freedom in America was not totally unrestrained. Americans overwhelmingly choose to limit their actions with moral codes such as the Ten Commandments. Personal morality and limited government; it’s a combination that characterized America and made it the envy of the world.
When our founding fathers decided they’d had enough of British oppression they broke away and declared independence. They stated as self evident truth in the Declaration of Independence “Men … are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights”. In other words, God gave man his rights and that among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. In the very next sentence, the founders defined the proper role of government when they stated “…that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted.”
This is the entire philosophical base of our nation. Here, the government cannot legitimately redistribute the wealth, assume power over the people’s lives and dominate man’s existence with oppressive taxation, regulations, and controls.
According to the founders, government was to be a negative force, which leaves people alone. Its sole function is to protect citizens from one another and from foreign governments, and especially from their own government itself. The founders did not create a government to be a positive force to do things for people, to take from some to give to others. They understood that when a government starts doing something for one citizen it has to take from another to do so and in the process, it gains control over both.
Britain’s rulers did not accept the Declaration of Independence so our forefathers had to fight a war to make it stick. By 1783, America won its war for Independence and British forces went back across the sea.
The governmental system at that time was weak. It had no power to settle disputes between the states or the power to tax for proper needs, such as defense. In 1787, delegates from twelve of the thirteen states met in Philadelphia to revise the system. They produced an entirely new governmental structure known as the Constitution of the United States. Keeping faith with the thunderous assertions in the declaration of Independence, they wrote the Constitution to govern the government, not the people, and not the states. Each state was a jealous guardian of its own sovereignty. The founders created a central government with strictly limited powers. This left the states free to compete with one another to be the best state, the one with the least amount of taxation and controls, one where citizens would want to build a business and raise a family. That spirit of competition produced excellence as honest competition always does.
It is important to note that the founders did not force the people to accept the Constitution. The Constitution went to the states for ratification and several of the founding fathers wrote essays explaining it in an effort to persuade fellow Americans to adopt this new system of government.
Some of the essays written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay were collected into a volume known as the Federalist Papers. Those essays provide valuable insights into the intent of the founders in establishing our government.
Eventually all thirteen states ratified the Constitution and then each ratified the first ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, further tying the hands of the Federal Government.
These amendments are indeed about rights but it would have been better had the Bill of Rights been labeled, The Bill of Limitations on Government. Why? Because it is vital to realize that the Bill of Rights never really gave the citizens any rights what so ever. Its sole purpose was to safe guard God given rights by limiting government power. The Bill of Rights protects your God given rights from interference by the government. The founders even insisted that Congress shall make no law about, speech, religion, the press, assembly, the right to petition, the right to keep and bear arms, and so on. The Bill of Rights directed squarely at the federal government, not the individual, and not the states. They are like most of the Ten Commandments, which are essentially thou shall not. The Bill of Rights says Congress shall not, shall not, shall not, all the way up to the marvelous tenth amendment, which says in effect, if we forgot anything you can’t do that either.
I visited the Time magazine Internet site to share my utter disgust at the magazine's highlighting such ignorance on the magazine's cover.
However, at the top of the page I saw, Time - in partnership with CNN and knew that arguing with idiots is not good practice.
Glenn Beck posits the question: “Can Man Rule Himself?”
If the left think that Man cannot rule himself, then how can they endorse Men ruling over other men?
This seems to be a paradox on the left.
If Man is not qualified to rule himself then isn’t man also equally unqualified to rule over others, be those men Kings, Dictators, or even Saints?
All the apparatus of government consists of men, but if the left is correct in their assertion that man cannot rule himself then should their goal be to minimize the sins of men ruling over other men?
exactly! They are redefining the concept "Health insurance'. And, the right is letting them get away with it.
““To be that miseducated suggests Mr Stengel went to an ivy league university.””
“Well said. And true.”
Bingo! Wikipedia says he graduated Magna Cum Laude from Princeton and then was a Rhode’s Scholar. A true menace to society.
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