To repeat: This extraordinary menace may well require an extraordinary response. Yet a month ago, could anyone have imagined that we would see the complete cessation of all church and synagogue worship in the United States? Or a total halt to citizens’ First Amendment right “peaceably to assemble and to petition the government”? Or the wholesale shutdown of entire industries and cultural events nationwide by unilateral decree? By and large, Americans have taken these restraints in stride.
Maybe they shouldn’t be so sanguine.
-Jeff Jacoby (Boston Globe, paywalled)
Has the American population finally been “tamed”? Ben Franklin famously said:
“Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Back in a post of mine from 2006 (the first year of GraniteGrok’s existence), I asked I asked about essential Rights
My question is: what are these essential liberties as far as you are concerned? If you had to rank all of the rights given to us in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which would be your top five?
In this time of “essential vs non-essential”, we talk about essential / non-essential businesses, essential / non-essential employees, essential / non-essential goods, and essential / non-essential services. Except for a few handful of keyboard pundits, relatively few are asking about what we see is being more fundamental: Liberties and Rights.
Lately, I’ve talked about the priorities of a local ordinance, a state regulation, a state statute, ditto at the Federal law – usually in the context of “anti-discrimination” when set again Constitutional strictures. With being reminded by Jacoby, I ask it again – this time, adding “Executive Orders”.
Effectively, they are all unilaterally made – and all are done by Executives (Governor, County Commissioner, Mayor – there have been a couple of instances of just bureaucrats making them as well) in which they have taken upon themselves the role of Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch, and the Judiciary.
These orders go far, FAR beyond any kind of regular of normal Legislative processes. EVEN IF (and not all are based on such) some statute gives such an Executive that awesome set of Powers, should they? Is it in our interest as citizens to have these wide latitude options that so easily available?
For with them, how much little must be advanced to equal that of the King whose shackles we threw off 243 yeas ago? The trashing of certain First Amendment Rights, wholesale “Takings” of private property – and where is it that part of Federal Government to effectively sideline (or outright kill off) entire sectors of industry? I yelled about that during Obama’s Administration (the “Taking” and then restructuring of the car industry, re-doing of the banks? And now we see that action pushed down to State level.
Is this all The Proper Role of Government, especially when based on horribly bad mathematical models in hope things might get better soon? A temporary sense of more safety?
And when the all clear shows up, how many of those running to Government for that safety (and we keep seeing more and more Democrats wanting GOvt to clamp down even more)?
Remember Cloward and Piven? I’ve written about them a number of times over the years. These two self-admitted Socialists hatched the idea of overloading Government by having more and more of the poor sign up for expensive services – and then demanding more of them plus additional ones (the ultimate mantra of Progressives, expressed by the New Deal of FDR) provided for by the switch from our Founders’ brilliant idea of Negative Rights (what Govt can’t do TO you) to Positive Rights (what Government MUST do FOR you). In short, totally turning upside down the Proper Role of Government.
And look what is happening now – Govt caused an economic disaster with arbitrarily large swaths of Society and is now trying to “fix” what it has wrought with MASSIVE amounts of our “future” cash. That number, for temporary safety, is anywhere from $2 up to $8 Trillion dollars (CARES Act).
Maybe they shouldn’t be so sanguine.
The TEA Party movement was kickstarted when Obama floated the idea that we all should be paying for other peoples’ mortgages (many who we personally knew had lived life to the fullest on re- and re- and re-mortgage their homes for new cars, eating out, new cars, exotic vacations, and the like. It didn’t go over well.
Now? Not many peeps out of most.
Sigh…
