by M. Richard MaxsonOver the coarse of my lifetime I have seen the freedoms guaranteed to all citizens by the Constitution disappear in bits and chunks through legislation slipped into law by the Congress. Except for a few years during the 2000's the Congress of the United States has been controlled by the Democrat-Socialist party. It is they who have inched this country quietly to the left.
Freedom is seldom destroyed all at once. More often it is eroded, bit by bit, until it is gone. This can happen so gradually that there is no sudden change that would alert people to the danger. By the time everybody realizes what has happened, it can be too late, because their freedom is gone.
One of the tricks of professional magicians is to distract the audience's attention from what they are doing while they are creating an illusion of magic. Pious talk about "giving back" distracts our attention from the cold fact that politicians are taking away more and more of our money and our freedom There have been three huge pieces of legislation that have deprived Americans of their individual freedoms.
They are:
The"War" on Drugs -
Property rights are terminated if charged with a crime under this law in complete violation of the Constitution.
The Patriot Act -
In the name of protecting the "Homeland" the right to privacy, free speach, and due process have been almost eliminated. The President even has the right to kill American citizens anywhere in the world.
Obamacare -
Congress can now lawfully command any behavior of individuals that it pleases whether or not the subject of the behavior is a power granted to Congress by the Constitution, and it may punish noncompliance with that command, so long as the punishment is called a tax.
The whole point of the collectivist mindset is to concentrate power in the hands of the collectivists -- which is to say, to take away our freedom. They do this in stages, starting with some group that others envy or resent -- Jews in Nazi Germany, capitalists in the Soviet Union, Caucasians in the US(although they do it to themselves), or foreign investors in Third World countries that confiscate their investments.
The Democrat-Socialists believe that some very wise people -- like themselves -- need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.They have a vision of themselves, as superior beings pursuing superior ends. The left has for more than a century been trying to get the Constitution's limitations on government loosened or evaded by judges' new interpretations, based on notions of "a living Constitution" that will take decisions out of the hands of "We the People," and transfer those decisions to our betters.
The self-flattery of the vision of the left also gives its true believers a huge ego stake in that vision, which means that mere facts are unlikely to make them reconsider, regardless of what evidence piles up against the vision of the left, and regardless of its disastrous consequences.Only our own awareness of the huge stakes involved can save us from the rampaging presumptions of our betters, whether they are called socialists or fascists. So long as we buy their heady rhetoric, we are selling our birthright of freedom.
