Politically Incorrect.

Should you harbor a politically correct bone in your body, you may find this post particularly offensive. Recommend you delete before reading. Ed.

For you, tolerance is at an end. Patience has no virtue. Resignation has no appeal. Tom Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, an anthem dedicated to a single precept — Individual Liberty.* Jefferson’s devotion to individual freedom was explicit, incontestable — a doctrine that unleashed Mankind’s greatest advance in human history. But just 24 decades later, that precious birthright is MIA, butchered and banished by Governments at all levels. Sadly, despite the soaring lyrics of the National Anthem, America is not free. Anyone who agrees with this judgment, at the very least, will be accused of distortion or gross exaggeration, perhaps even deception. Accusers will ask, “How free does anyone need to be?” You travel where you want when you want. You can own a home or invent a business. You can freely buy and sell, worship or not, surf the net or not, own a weapon or not, burn the flag or not, kneel or not. So how free do you need to be? Specifically? Free to be a racist. Free to hold prejudice against anyone or anything, for any reason or no reason. As a restaurant owner, free to post a sign that says, “Whites Only,” or “Blacks Only” or “Jews Not Allowed.” As a bakery owner, free to refuse service for a Gay Wedding. As a private business owner, free to discriminate — against any ethnicity, age or gender. As an atheist, free to condemn God and religion. As a private business owner, free to ban unions. As a business owner, free to reject the Affordable Care Act. As an individual, free not to pay taxes onĀ  “earned” income. As a business owner, free to ignore the NLRB and EPA. As a parent, free to expel the Federal Government from your child’s public school education. As a driver, free to rebuff seat belt laws. As an everyday citizen, free to ignore the millions of regulations made by agency officials who were never elected and never empowered by The Constitution to write and enforce laws. Sorry, citizen, you are no freer, arguably less free, than the colonists were under British rule in 1774. You doubt this, of course. But first, reconsider: Your government controls education, healthcare, the banking system and the discredited justice system. Your government regulates every aspect of business life, intrudes on your personal life and has unrestricted spending power, including the obscene power to tax your “earned” income. If you care to study the 16th Amendment, ratified in 1913, you’ll discover that your recent ancestors were sold a deceitful bill of goods. Or put another way, the Government lied. But, then, the Government always lies. The Government sold the 16th Amendment on the premise that the “income” to be taxed would be “unearned income,” — that is, it would be profit from investments, interest, dividends, capital gains, and net income from business and corporate earnings. Hallelujah! In other words, it was a “soak the rich” amendment. “Income tax” would not apply to the wages and salaries of the “working class.” Suckers, all. Here you are, 104 years later — paying taxes in 2017, to feed the insatiable Federal beast — already $21 trillion in the red. Here’s the bottom line, citizen. You are the Servant. The Government is the Master. Get used to it. Not exactly what Tom and his pals had in mind, although they did predict the outcome. You want to find fault but how can you fix blame? Pogo said everyone’s to blame. That’s not true. There is, prima facie, an original guilty party; and as often is the case, it’s the very one that wears the venerated mantle of wisdom — The Supreme Court of the United States. The SCOTUS decided early on that the Founders’ work needed the benefit of a modern intellect, that their work should be interpreted — continuously sliced and diced, reformed, remodeled and repaired. Presto, their meddling has given America what is known as the Annotated Constitution — The Constitution you live by. No one in America lives by The Constitution as it was written. No, you are not free. Not free as the Founders intended. Nor free as God ordained.

* Critics enjoy attacking Jefferson and his peers because many owned slaves. Was he truly a champion of Liberty or just another hypocrite? You decide. The following paragraph was in Jefferson’s original draft, eventually removed. Had it not been removed, you would not have celebrated July 4, 1776. Decades later, Jefferson blamed the removal on delegates from South Carolina and Georgia as well as Northern delegates who represented merchants actively involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Ed.

Jefferson’s Original Draft
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

Postscript
In his essay “How to Understand Slavery and the American Founding,” Matthew Spaulding writes: “. . . no charge of insincerity or hypocrisy can be fairly laid to their charge. Never from their lips was heard one syllable of attempt to justify the institution of slavery. They universally considered it as a reproach fastened upon them by the unnatural step-mother country and they saw that before the principles of the Declaration of Independence, slavery . . . was destined . . . to be banished from the earth.”

 

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