Lamenting The Lost Legacy Of Independence Day

Bill Frezza
Forbes Magazine
Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Why do we still celebrate Independence Day? Is it a lingering habit, a mindless bit of nostalgia, a time to indulge in fireworks and barbecues, devoid of any deeper meaning? Can anyone honestly argue that our nation still honors the values, or practices the principles, for which our Founders fought?

Today, most Americans have been trained to be embarrassed by the “extremist” individualist ethos that made the protection of liberty the primary purpose of government. They have been taught to apologize for the shortcomings of the “rich white men” who led the revolution. A majority of Americans now subscribe to an expansive view of government as both great provider and beneficent leveler. Its primary purpose is to redress unequal or unhappy outcomes, regardless of their source, through wealth redistribution on a scale so vast that it mocks the concept “private property.”

As for the causes of revolution, we’ve lost sight of them, too. King George III was a champion of laissez-faire compared to the modern cradle-to-grave entitlement state. The swollen capital city named after the man who won our freedom now claims the prize for erecting “a Multitude of new offices” bent on sending out “Swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” If there is a field of endeavor that the federal government does not yet regulate, subsidize, or penalize, just wait. A new law is only a “crisis” away.

Have these new offices been imposed on us by some malevolent force that has undermined the workings of democracy? No. We the people ceaselessly demand new offices at an accelerating rate. The majority of Americans vote as if they believe that massive new government programs— created by incomprehensibly complex laws and administered by increasingly unaccountable bureaucrats—can solve an expanding array of “problems” which our Founders would have surely concluded were the proper province of civil society and not the sovereign state.

The King was criticized for unjustly imprisoning seamen. Today, our federal and state governments imprison more of our fellow citizens than any totalitarian regime in history—the vast majority for violating a futile prohibition on the possession, sale, or consumption of substances our Founders would not have thought twice about. Vast portions of our youth are thus rendered permanently unemployable, branded as felons and outcasts with nowhere to turn but a life of crime. And yet we persist in this folly, unable to admit that drug prohibition has been as huge a failure as alcohol prohibition.

Full story here.

This article was posted: Wednesday, July 4, 2012 at 3:16 pm

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