American Founding Principles.

Vic Biorseth, Wednesday, March 14, 2012
http://www.Thinking-Catholic-Strategic-Center.com

Once upon a time, every American with a 4th or 5th grade education knew and embraced the American founding principles; but that was before the gradual ideological takeover of the American education system was complete. Today, I conjecture that no American high-school graduates of the public school system, and exceptionally few college graduates, have even the first clue of what it is that America is founded upon (unless they learned it at home.) So, before we look at our national purpose for being, our founding principles, we should take a look at the enemies of those principles, and at what they have done and are doing to us as a people.

We have drifted too far from our American Founding Principles. We are suddenly awakening to our drifting status by the realization that our direction of drift is directly toward calamity. Question: have we really been inattentively dozing and randomly drifting, or has our course been craftily manipulated by enemies and opponents of our American Founding Principles? Who would do such a thing? Who would such enemies and opponents be?

1. Marxists, of various spot and stripe. Both the Bolshevik-Communist variety of Marxists who would liquidate the Bourgeoisie and expropriate all capital and property; and the Nazi-Fascist variety of Marxists, who would, through crony-capitalism, manipulate and control all banking, industry and business. Modern Marxists, under the inspiration of the likes of Chairman Mao and Saul Alinsky, “swim in the sea of the people” and pretend to be normal patriotic citizens of the nations they parasitize while they plot and work toward revolution. See the Refuting Marx page.
2. Anarchists, who oppose all authority, in every area of life, as an obstruction to personal liberty. Religious authority, teaching authority, civil authority, government authority, all, are seen by the anarchist as infringements on civil liberty. The anarchist is just as revolutionary as the Marxist, and seeks a classless, government-less collective existence, similar if not equal to Marx’s dream of the ultimate Communist Utopia. In the anarchist view, all authority must be questioned, resisted and ultimately destroyed.
3. Moslems, who, in strict accordance with the Koran, seek to eventually convert, subjugate or kill all who are not yet Moslems. Over the centuries Islamic war strategy has morphed into an insidious infiltration and intermingling with foreign populations until numbers are sufficient to rise up and take over from inside, mixed with terrorism. Traveling under the false banner of “Religion Of Peace,” Islam nevertheless maintains its ultimate goal of eventual world subjugation and domination. See the Refuting Mohammed page.
4. Comrade Obama (peace be upon him), who is a strange mixture of all of the above. The only work he has ever done is Communist community organizing, which is to say, recruitment and agitation toward revolution; and he has taught Alinskyite anti-American infiltration and revolution, in complete accord with normal, orthodox, every-day American major university practice. He is the chief organizer and author of the current Occupy Wall Street movement, and he works from within the White House to destroy Constitutional America. See the Refuting Obama page.

So, is Comrade Obama (peace be upon him) a Marxist? He is a kind-of sort-of Marxist; he is, primarily, a manipulator of other Marxists. He uses Marxism to achieve his ends. Is he an Anarchist then? He is a kind-of sort of anarchist; he is, primarily, a manipulator of other anarchists. He uses anarchy to achieve his ends. Might he be a Moslem then? He is a kind-of sort-of Moslem; he is, primarily, a manipulator of other Moslems. He uses Islam to achieve his ends. He is about as close to the personification of evil that any man can be. I believe he is a revolutionary who intends to be dictator and whose sole guiding rule is The Ends Justify The Means.

Marxists, anarchists and Moslems, all, come in three major flavors. At the top, there are the “in-the-know” anti-institution revolutionary zealots who perpetrate the fraud and manipulate the other followers. Among these are those who would make themselves dictator, or at the least a very high-ranking official. Some of these hope to become dictator of some nation following the models of the satellites of the old Soviet Union and China. Some – perhaps most – of them hope to become ultimate dictator of the world in the New World Order. In the middle, there are the zealous, committed, super-idealistic “educated fools” who actually believe the fraudulent theory of Marxism (or of anarchism, or of Islam,) and who therefore work tirelessly to save the world from itself and bring about the dreamed of (but fraudulent) utopia. The real manipulators above them regularly pat them on the head and tell them what a good job they are doing. At the bottom, there are the “useful idiot” followers who don’t really have the first clue about what’s going on. The dedicated union members, various “organized” others, such as ACORN workers, Occupy Wall Street, the dregs of society, and those who have been propagandized and schmoozed into believing that they are “disenfranchised” and exploited by whatever employment, institution, race, religion, government, nation or other system that exists at the moment. The whole goal is, always and everywhere, revolution against the existing status quo, no matter what the status quo might be.

Most of my friends and all of talk radio, which is the only real public venue left to American constitutional conservatism, seem to believe that Comrade Obama (peace be upon him) is from the middle group, which is to say that he is educated beyond his intelligence; a Marxist of the believing – idealistic variety who got himself elected President, and now he is in over his head and simply floundering. I disagree. I believe he is a real revolutionary, and his intention from the beginning was the destruction of constitutional America. Even if I am wrong – and I may be wrong – it is wise to be spiritually, mentally and physically prepared for the worst possible scenario. I believe he intends to keep pushing and prodding and angering until people are out in the streets, when he can crack down, declare martial law, suspend the Constitution and take over. (If you don’t think that can happen, try to imagine what happens when gasoline hits $10 per gallon, and/or the purchasing power of the American dollar hits zero.) He hopes some crisis will be big enough for him to do that, and he is doing everything in his power to bring it about. He does much to induce multiple crises of wide and wild variety, and he does nothing to alleviate any crisis. If a big enough crisis doesn’t happen in time, he will lose the election in November; by January inauguration day, his great opportunity may be gone.

To that end, he is ignoring the Constitution, destroying the value of the dollar, raising the price of gasoline and all fuel, raising the cost of all energy, destroying our coal industry, destroying our oil industry, openly attacking our religion, taking charge of banking and industry, spending us into oblivion, borrowing to no limit, printing too much money, bailing out hopeless cases, stimulating his unions and his cronies with our taxes, opening the borders, alienating allies, showing weakness to enemies, and on, and on, and on. His nuttiest supporters cannot say, with a straight face, that he is pro-Christian, or pro-Jew, or pro-business, or pro-national security, or pro-equal justice, or even pro-American.

He doesn’t even know what American founding principles are. He is merely a revolutionary, primarily of the Marxist variety, and Marxist revolutionaries seek revolution against whatever form of authority exists at the moment; he doesn’t care what our founding principles are.

But you and I do indeed need to know about our American Founding Principles.

American Founding Principles Defined.

The American Founding Principles come out of our Declaration of Independence, which is our national founding document. Signed and published on July 4, 1776, it marks the beginning point of America. The words are reproduced on this website in the Jefferson Speaks page. If you ever get a chance to examine the real thing or a good copy, you will see a thing of beauty as well as a vitally important piece of world history. I have a beautiful copy framed and hanging on my office wall. It is a beautiful parchment with eloquent language and exquisite penmanship amply demonstrated by the author and all signatures.

Once upon a time, American school children would memorize parts of it, and then be called upon, one at a time, to recite the first part – which begins “When in the course of human events … “, or the second, which begins “We hold these truths to be self evident … “, or one of the others, down the list, until the class had heard the whole of it. It was studied; it was important. That was then, this is now. Today, I would conjecture that the average public school student has never even read it. And that, my friend, is the problem: we have forgotten what we are about here in America, and why this nation exists. I urge you – if you are a fellow American, I beg you – to take the time to read and study every single word of the American Declaration of Independence in order to begin rectifying that problem, one citizen at a time.

The second part, which, once upon a time, many an American schoolboy committed to memory, is the giant golden nugget that contains the nucleus of our American Founding Principles. Let’s read it together:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

So, these then are our national founding principles, taken from the quote above:

1. Recognition of God as our Creator, and of His blessing of us with these natural endowments and rights.
2. Equality in rights, protections and remedies before the law.
3. Life; protection against the unwarranted taking of innocent human life.
4. Liberty; the ability of a citizen to pursue his own legitimate interests and to work legitimately in his own self-interest without interference by government.
5. Pursuit of Happiness; the right of a citizen to prosper from the work of his own hands.
6. Organizing, meaning, writing a Constitution organizing the new nation in such a way as to protect and preserve these foundational principles, using them as the constitutional foundation.

Some facts to consider regarding these foundational rights:

• They are unalienable rights; they cannot be taken away.
• God, not government, is the author of these rights. Government does not, and cannot legitimately grant such rights, or take them away.
• The very purpose of government is to protect these rights.
• Government derives all of its just powers from the consent of us – we, the people, grant the government the power to govern.

American Founding Principles: Equality.

I submit that what the Founding Fathers meant by equality, for Americans, in America, is radically different than how most of the world interprets that word. American equality means, precisely, equality before the law. That means, equal rights, protections, limitations, remedies and treatment before the law. Now, that may sound very simple, but it is not. Apply a little critical thinking to it. Test it. Equality before the law means that:

We Americans have no ruler.

We are a nation of laws before we are a nation of men.

America has no titles and no titled nobility, no dynasties and no “classes” that typically arise from within hereditary monarchies. We will have no monarchs; we will not be ruled. We operate in equality, following our American Judao-Christian Ethos as best we can. Whenever you compromise on the principle of equality, bad things happen. The Compromise page talks about America’s first forced political compromise on the equality principle regarding slavery. It was not good.

Equality Principle Miss-Applied. American Equality means equality before the law. A perversion of the principle of equality before the law would be material equality, or social equality, or wealth equality. The fatal flaw in the motto of the French Revolution, which was Liberty, Equality, Fraternity is that that form of equality is mutually exclusive with liberty. To attain absolute equality in material goods and possessions, wealth, status, etc., with everyone else would necessarily require abandoning every single human right, with the sole exception of one solitary human right: the right to be in exactly the same condition – be it material, possessions, wealth, status, whatever – as everyone else. The right to social sameness costs every other right of man, especially the right to excel, at anything, and the right to improve your own condition in any way.

Marx sought to capitalize on the seeming unfairness of some having more than others with his great fraud promising a Communist Utopia in which everyone would be equal, and happy. (See the Refuting Marx page.) Marxian theory, in the belief that God does not exist and is not the author of nature, teaches that the nature of man can be changed, for the better, making man a happy, perfect worker, working altruistically beside his fellow workers, in an eventual stateless, government-less, authority-less worker’s paradise, in which every man is equal, and every man has every other man’s best interests at heart, rather than his own.

Of course, Marxism was and remains an outright fraud and hoax, the true but hidden goal of which was and remains the eventual achievement of dictatorship. Marxism has had ample opportunity to prove the fact that when you change the nature of man, he is no longer man. No form of Marxism has ever fed the hungry or achieved anything near the dreamed-of Marxian utopian equality. All any form of Marxism has ever brought about has been mass impoverishment, brutal dictatorship and the generation of dominated, dependent, amoral and even immoral populations in serious need of redemption.

In America, where Marxist ideology now dominates the Democrat Party, the mainstream news media, the public school system, upper academia, and nearly the whole of the entertainment industry, the unfairness to be capitalized on is somewhat different. Since we are relatively classless and all equal before the law, the unfairness Marxists seize upon involves success in life, and the lack of it. Individuals and families that are more successful in their use of equal opportunity are held to hold an unfair advantage over individuals and families that are less successful. But Marxism really has the same intention everywhere, that being, the elimination (or confiscation) of private property for the free use or abuse of the dictator, and the steady migration of power from the people to the government.

American Founding Principles: Life.

What, exactly, is life? What is the nature of this spark, or whatever it may be, that gives animation to a creature and makes it alive? How is it that it is so easy for man to take life from a creature, but impossible for man to give it back? Since life itself is so common and abundant everywhere, why is it that man cannot make something that is not alive live?

Our Judao-Christian religion tells us that God is the author of life and man is His chief steward. Man is the steward of his family, his fields, crops, flocks and herds, and the environment immediately around him. Man is the co-creator of life within his family, and somewhat of a manipulator of life in breeding his animals and his crops for his own purposes.

”Thou shalt not kill” said the Lord to Moses. Human beings are created in the image and likeness of God; they have a sacred aspect to them, and that sacred aspect is life itself. The actual words that Moses brought down from the mountain were ”Thou shalt not do murder”, meaning, the unwarranted taking of innocent human life. Innocent human life is sacred. A major aspect of the underlying purpose of charity is to recognize and pay homage to the sacred nature of a living human being.

”Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” said God to man. Early America did that; most typical families were quite large. Large families formed large and strong support systems for all the family members. Any family member who started a business was supported by the whole family, and the whole family participated in the business. Often one family eventually was involved in multiple businesses. When families were large and strong and the Church or Synagogue was the center of social life as well as worship, America was never stronger or more vibrant, inventive and innovative.

Life Principle Miss-Applied.

We addressed the worst abuses of the American founding principle of Life in the God an Nature page, where man began to deny the existence of God, and to defy nature. There we said that to oppose nature is to oppose God, and that to oppose God is to oppose nature. God made nature. Not man; God.

Nevertheless, today we see that Enlightened, Modern, Secular, well-educated, sophisticated man “knows” better. In the Contraception page we said that Artificial Contraception became the chief tool of Materialism with which to destroy Monotheism, and that general, popular acceptance of Artificial Contraception marked the single most destructive turning point in the history of Western Culture, marking the end of moral norms, foretelling tolerance of anything at all.

Once American religious leaders, including many Catholic bishops, defied and defiled the ancient Judao-Christian doctrines against Contraception, the writing was on the wall. Religious leadership was leading the way for society. Once the American public sense of morality was compromised to the point that use of artificial contraception was becoming a commonplace accepted thing, the camel’s nose was under the tent, and what was coming next was imminently predictable. And, indeed, it was predicted, by Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae, with an accuracy comparable to the Old Testament Prophets. And, like the Old Testament Prophets, Paul VI and Humanae Vitae were roundly condemned in a tidal wave of Catholic and non-Catholic dissent. Everything Paul VI warned us about came to be.

First, sex within marriage obtained a new purpose supplanting the old one of generating a family – the new purpose was, of course, fun. Sex for the married couple became an exercise in mutual masturbation for its own sake, with an accompanying loss of mutual respect. Second, sex outside of marriage – meaning either fornication or adultery – became more attractive and tempting because the possibility of pregnancy was so reduced. A sense of responsibility was similarly reduced. Third, once the idea was instilled that a, if not the, major purpose for sexual activity was fun, deviant sex and homosexuality became more tempting in the quest for more and more fun. Achieving sexual gratification, of any kind whatsoever, became a need, and even a “right” in many minds. Self denial, self control and self discipline began to disappear. The false promise of sex without consequence inevitably led to the social acceptance of sex as a mere leisure activity.

Enlightened, Modern, Secular, well-educated, sophisticated man was now driving the bus, and American religious leadership quite willingly took a back seat. Of course, the increase in sexual activity of all sorts led to the consequences associated with illicit sex, despite the false promises of contraception. Every form or contraception has a failure rate, and, the increase in the associated activity necessarily means many practicing the now accepted activity without use of contraception. Once sex for the sake of sex was socially acceptable, contraception itself often became an afterthought.

Contraception promised fewer unwanted births; that was proved to be wrong by a rocketing illegitimate birth rate. Marriage rates are down; why get married? Divorce rates are up; why stay married when someone else looks more sexually attractive? Contraception brought us a multi-billion dollar Abortion industry, and a new anti-establishment Pro-Choice “women’s” movement to join the pantheon of other anti-establishment, anti-Western morality movements. Abortion is just another form of contraception. Acceptance of contraception brought with it rocketing venereal disease rates; rather than blaming the causative activity – sex outside of marriage – Enlightened, Modern, Secular, well-educated, sophisticated thought attempted to educate man out of venereal disease infection while man still participated in the causative activity. (Because it was fun and it was a healthy activity, and it was not healthy to deny yourself.)

Under government mandate, all public schools teach little American children the mechanics of safe fornication, protected sodomy and how to put a condom on a cucumber, even as venereal disease rates continue to rocket. When diseases such as HPV that are not prevented by condoms (or anything else) rocketed, TTRSTF in the CDC developed a vaccine to prevent it, and our Enlightened, Modern, Secular, well-educated, sophisticated government is now ordering the public school system to vaccinate 10 and 11 year old public school children against HPV, without parental approval, so that they may be free to “safely” randomly copulate like little animals, and like their teachers, and like their public-school educated parents, and like their government officials. That is the new sophisticated behavior.

While the illegitimate birth rate rises along with the abortion rate (because the government pays people to have illegitimate children,) the legitimate birth rate to married couples is insufficient to grow the population, or even sustain it, which rings the death knell for the American normative family. How many young families do you know today that have more than two kids? The growth of single-parent families on welfare generally produces a growth in eventual citizens who are “on their own” with only a loose to non-existent family support network. They are part of a growing demographic that repeats the behaviors of the parents. As secular (or secularized) thought has advanced, the recognition of the sacred has declined. The sophisticated secular man does not even recognize the term sacredness itself; he holds nothing whatsoever to be sacred. Certainly not life. Thanks to the advance of secular sophisticated thought, he normative two-parent family in America is on the skids.

Meanwhile, the typical Moslem man has four wives, 20 children and 400 grandchildren.

American Founding Principles: Liberty.

Liberty and government are related, in the individual, and in the larger society. There is an internal liberty and an internal government at the individual citizen level, and there are external expressions of liberty and government in the external social order. For a government to be relatively “free” as compared to other governments, the majority of citizens must be more self-governed, as individuals. If a people wish to enjoy liberty in the larger society, that liberty must be tempered by reason and good moral conduct, at the individual level.

You cannot talk about a formal form of representative government for a nation until you recognize the willingness of the typical citizen to self-govern his own external behavior. Representative government must compliment, support and under-gird the pre-existing guiding ethos of the citizenry, or it will not work. Furthermore, the pre-existing guiding ethos of the citizenry must be good, decent and moral, or, again, it will not work.

The guiding ethos of America since her founding has been the Judao-Christian Ethos of Western Civilization. It springs from the Judao-Christian religion, and its driving purpose is to align personal will with the will of God, and to always seek to do His will. Liberty at the individual level, or internal liberty, means: freedom from worldly temptations, and self-control exercised over sin; i.e., freedom from sin. To become a slave to the Lord is to become liberated from the temptations of the world. That is held to be the best form of freedom. It makes a man self-governing. A self-governing population enables a government to be less restrictive.

The reverse is also true. When the citizenry is immoral or amoral, meaning that they follow no particular moral norm, they need strong government to restrict them from robbing or enslaving or eating each other. The less self-governing a people are the more in need of strong government they are. In 1865 a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville toured America and wrote his famous Democracy in America exploring what was different about America, and exactly what it was that made America so spectacularly exceptional among nations. Here is how we summarized Tocqueville’s findings in the God and Nature webpage:

And what of we, the governed? We – many of us, perhaps even most of us – like our current government, are largely Enlightened, Modern, Secular, sophisticated, well-educated people, after the pattern of the Democrat Party and the “Establishment” Republican Party. That is to say that many, and perhaps most of us, no longer properly recognize our own Creator, and we therefore and thereby deny our own nature. That is why the political arguments and positions of the current government sound so reasonable, decent and compelling to so many.

Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote:

”The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.”:

What are these “morals” he spoke of? The moral code of Western Civilization came out of the Judao-Christian religions, as described in the Judao-Christian Ethos page. The moral code of America’s Founders and Framers was that same Judao-Christian morality. The moral standard of the American population today is that same Judao-Christian morality, since 86% of the American population professes to be Christian, however well or poorly they may follow the teachings of Christianity, and our largest religious minority is probably Jewish. That is how we tell right from wrong; that is how Tocqueville determined that the American people were a “good” people.

Thus, he wrote that America was great because America was good, and if America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great. And that Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other. And that liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith. And he predicted our current decline, when he wrote that “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” And that “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”

How prescient he was. Today the Democrat Party, which is driven by Marxist ideology, is doing everything in its power to turn our Republic into a Democracy; from Amendment XVII, reducing the Senate to be just another elected House, to ongoing efforts to eliminate the Electoral College. At the same time, the Democrat Party is doing everything in its power to increase public benefits out of the treasury and make as many people as possible completely dependent upon the state. To say that citizens are dependent is to say that they are no longer independent, and that is to say that they are slaves. The ultimate goal of the Democrat Party is, just as Tocqueville predicted, movement of our Republic into a democracy, social collapse, and finally, dictatorship.

But what is even worse for America, as an exceptional nation emphasizing citizen liberty, is our movement away from our guiding Judao-Christian Ethos and into something approaching the opposite.

Liberty Principle Miss-Applied.

Those who reject the Judao-Christian Ethos interpret Liberty to mean the freedom to do whatever the hell you want to do. To the amoral man, there are no moral rules; to the immoral man, what he wants to do is that which is morally forbidden. The Libertarian position leans to amorality, in that it says only that the rights of my fist end where your nose begins. In other words, do whatever you want, so long as you don’t do harm to anyone else, or their rights. This is to say that there is no fixed moral norm for all of society; whatever floats you boat is fine, so long as you do not rock my boat. I submit that the trend toward legalizing so-called victimless-crime is movement in the wrong direction. We are either a moral people with a fixed, recognizable moral standard, or we are not.

American so-called public education is in truth Marxist ideological indoctrination in disguise. That same alien, anti-American ideology infects American higher education, and virtually runs the very “best” and most recognized American universities and colleges. Thus, we are ever increasingly becoming an Enlightened, Modern, Secular, well educated, sophisticated people. And the more sophisticated we are, the less moral we are.

The Democrat Party and the “Establishment” Republican Party are far more sophisticated than they are moral. (What I mean by the “Establishment” Republican Party is the few hundred or so inside the beltway Party hirelings, pollsters, pundits, and those older, long-term elected officials who hold (or covet) important House or Senate committee chairs or memberships, or other powerful positions, and who centrally direct or control Party political funds and control elections in as much as they can.) Today, I submit that to be sophisticated is very nearly the opposite of being moral.

In the Judao-Christian Ethos, a man laying with another man, or a woman laying with another woman, is an abomination. In today’s sophisticated thought, merely saying that such things are an abomination is hate speech, and very nearly, if not in fact, illegal. It is the same with abortion. In fact, you cannot name a moral issue that the modern “sophisticated” position is not on the immoral side of. What is worse, the sophisticated position is not merely an opinion, among others – it most frequently drives legislation and regulation, and makes the opposite view illegal and against the law. Sophisticated thought grants special rights, privileges and protections to sinners so that they can sin. And, sophisticated thought relegates the devout Christian and the practicing Jew to the ranks of the unsophisticated, unenlightened, uneducated troglodytes.

We can only wonder what a reincarnated Tocqueville might say about America today. It might not be as bad as you might think. Note well that the “Establishment” Republican Party is a distinct, small minority among Republicans. The great Tea Party awakening has proved that there are many more of us than there are of them. The American citizenry is still overwhelmingly conservative, and the citizenry is now waking up, thanks to the impending threats to our national existence brought on by the rapid advance of Obamunism. It is time to take our country back and turn it around.

American Founding Principles: Pursuit of Happiness.

The Pursuit of Happiness means the ability to work in your own self-interest, and the right to prosper from the work of your own hands. The inalienable right to the Pursuit of Happiness is at the root, and is the cause of what we call Capitalism. Capitalism is the economic “system” that is automatically brought into being when and where men enjoy liberty and the right to the pursuit of happiness. Another name for Capitalism is the Free Market. It is not planned or controlled in any way by government; Capitalism is natural. Men free to pursue happiness freely exchange goods and services with each other for mutually agreed prices. Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations only defined and described Capitalism; he didn’t invent it.

Capitalism existed before America existed, but always less perfectly. As soon as some men began to prosper by some endeavor, their government would find a way to either horn in on the prosperity through new taxes, or to restrict it in such a way as to be favorable to someone else, perhaps a competitor, perhaps the government itself. Any restrictions on the right to pursue happiness or to control some aspect of Capitalism is destructive of the natural system. The more controls or restrictions put in place, the more the “system” becomes a controlled or planned economic system, i.e., a Socialistic economy. Capitalism cannot be controlled or planned; if it is controlled or planned, it is no longer Capitalism.

The perfect example or model of how the inalienable right to the Pursuit of Happiness brought extreme prosperity to America as a nation would be the family farm, or ranch. The family grows up on the farm, working on it from childhood on. While all members of the family might not remain on the farm, there are enough that always do. Those who are born on the land, and live on the land, and grow up working the land, in general, love the family land as much as they love the family. They love the land, they know how to make it produce, and they know how to keep it from going infertile. What the American farmer, raised on a farm in a farm family, knows about farming cannot be taught in any school. No agricultural education is or can ever be equivalent to growing up in a family running a working farm. There is nothing quite like it. What the farmer or the rancher does for a living is produce food; what they don’t eat or preserve, they sell, and selling food, from the family farm to the whole world, became America’s first recognized source of national prosperity.

Now there are and have been many variations of family-run businesses that are similar but not the same, ranging from the family restaurant or restaurant chain, to the family automobile (or other product) company; but the nucleus of it all, the original and, in my opinion, still most important of all of these is the family run farm or ranch. Not everyone can productively farm for very long. Farming is a high risk business in which there may be multiple very bad years in a row. There are many, many more ways to fail at farming than there are to succeed. People who grow up working land they own and love are absolutely indispensable to making that land produce over the long run.

The sole source of wealth creation is the individual working in his own self interest. There is no other source of wealth creation. Governments do not and cannot create wealth; governments can only consume wealth. Thus, the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness is indispensable to wealth creation. The source of new wealth then, is this:

A man produces more of whatever he produces than he needs.

Whatever excess good or service a man produces from his work beyond his own personal needs is profit for him. If he works for wages, whatever he earns beyond paying for his food, clothing, shelter, etc., is his profit, or his wealth. By natural right, it is his private property. Thus, it may be said that:

Profit = Wealth = Property

Because it is his private property, the man who earned it may do with it as he pleases. He may sell it, save it, invest it, squander it, spend it, trade or exchange it for something else, gamble with it, tithe with it or give it away, as he and he alone sees fit.

Pursuit of Happiness Principle Miss-Applied.

Marxism, in any historical variety and in any new manifestation, is opposed to the Pursuit of Happiness. Marxism drives society toward The Great Collective in which all property is shared. As Marx himself put it:

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property. --Karl Marx.

Marx, of course, wrote the Communist Manifesto, and, as we said in the Refuting Marx page, he thereby perpetrated one of the greatest socio-political hoaxes to be found in human history. The true goal was and remains world dictatorship, but all the millions of people fooled by the hoax actually believed, and believe, that the true goal was and remains the achievement of ultimate fairness, to be accomplished by the establishment of a true utopia – a perfect, Worker’s Paradise: a man-made heaven on earth called Communism. That’s the lure, or the bait. But, once the fish is pulled into the boat, he discovers that he is totally and completely owned; how unfair. P. T. Barnum said it best: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Marxist notions began infecting American politics probably beginning with President Theodore Roosevelt, who split off from the Republican Party to form the Progressive Party, which became popularly known as the Bull Moose Party because of Roosevelt’s claim that he was fit as a bull moose. The Progressive Party platform contained most if not all of the social programs listed by Marx in his Communist Manifesto. From Socialized Medicine to support of organized labor, the right to strike, provision for social security, disability, the eight-hour work day, progressive income tax, centralized banking and general movement toward and into “direct democracy,” which must be recognized as the Marxian path to national destruction followed by dictatorship.

These “democracy” programs included direct election of the senate, public referendum (meaning the ability of the public to enact law by direct vote,) and the initiative (meaning the ability of the public to propose a law before enacting it through referendum.) All of these programs, of course, fly in the face of American Founding Principles, and directly oppose the limitations of the Constitution, which was designed, written and enacted specifically to prevent government intrusion into these areas. We are a Republic, not a Democracy.

Democracy is the road to socialism. --Karl Marx.

The political form of a society wherein the proletariat is victorious in overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be a democratic republic. --Vladimir Lenin.

Democracy is indispensable to socialism. --Vladimir Lenin

That is why the Founders and the Framers decided on making America into a Republic, and set in place severe restrictions on any movement toward direct democracy.

The Progressive movement is a variant of Marxism in which social change, including the elimination of private property, is to be brought about through slow “progress” rather than sudden revolution. It uses the infamous Hegelian Dialectic method spoken of in the Refuting Marx page. It is death by a thousand cuts. It means taking in little nibbles what the true Revolutionary would prefer to take in one step. The Hegelian Dialectic uses one, or more than one, seemingly small crisis at a time to advance the ball down the field, inch by inch, yard by yard, convincing the public that it is acting in their best interest. The end goal is the same; it still requires adoption of the evil Machiavellian dictum, The Ends Justify The Means, because it cannot be done honestly, openly and in the full light of day.

Progressivism made its greatest advances in America under Presidents Wilson, Hoover and FDR; it made further gains under Johnson, Carter, Clinton, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. And now, we have, in Comrade Obama (peace be upon him) a real Marxist Revolutionary struggling to suppress his violent revolutionary instincts and act the part of the more peaceful Progressive.

Bottom line: the American government was not designed and was not intended to take care of us, the people, or to concern itself with our social needs. We are supposed to take care of ourselves. All our federal government is supposed to do, in accordance with the Constitution, is to legislate law, to enforce law and to adjudicate law. If it isn’t listed in Article 1 Section 8 of the federal Constitution, the federal government has no business doing it. Period.

American Founding Principles: Organizing.

This is very important; to refresh our memories, let’s read it again:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Once the Founders signed the Declaration and then fought and won the Revolutionary War, the Framers – mostly the same people – gathered in the first Constitutional Convention to agree on the Organization of the new government. The whole purpose of the new governmental organization was to protect and preserve the defined American principles of equality, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That is what our Constitution achieved.

I shall write a new webpage on the organizational principles in our Constitution, and when it is complete I will put a link to it in this sentence; it will be called the American Constitutional Principles. Until then …

Seek the Truth; find the Way; live the Life. Please God, and live forever.

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