Reflections on the Fourth of July

I’m visiting my family this Fourth of July in the heartland of America. I enjoy visiting the heartland because the people here adhere to the “live and let live” philosophy of liberty and self-reliance (at least that’s how it used to be). Sadly, Americans are increasingly more reliant on government largess, quick to look to government to solve every problem and as a means to get what they want by force.

It’s fitting on this day to remember the legacy left us. Two-hundred and thirty-five years ago, the founders declared independence from an oppressive and tyrannical government. A motley band of farmers, craftsmen, tradesmen and frontiersmen fought and won a revolution. They defeated mercantilism, autocracy, tyranny and the elitist addiction to power and dominance. In that moment, they forever changed the course of human history.

To preserve their hard-fought liberty, they wrote a Constitution and formed a Republic that was designed to keep government off our backs. They embraced the principle that our rights are God-given (natural) and not something granted to us by government. The framers believed strongly that the power of government ought to be limited and that individual liberty is inalienable.

It’s sad to see how far we have strayed from these original principles, even in the heartland of America. I read in the local papers the same problems that we have back home in New Jersey; out of control spending, excessively generous pension funds that are now insolvent, sundry groups lobbying for a handout and big business in bed with big government at the expense of the taxpayer (just to name a few things). People are divided into factions and fighting with one another, not over principles of individual liberty, but to gain a better position at the public trough.

How did we get here? Most of the issues that divide America are zero-sum issues where one group's gain is another's loss. Examples are: racial preferences, school prayers, trade restrictions, welfare, Obamacare, bailouts, immigration, public sector unions and a plethora of other government policies that benefit one American at the expense of another. Each faction lobbies to gain access to the coercive power of government to take what belongs to one and give it to another or to create a special privilege for one that comes at the expense of another.

Is this the system that our founders envisioned and fought for? Americans today seem happy to grant power to the elites who work tirelessly to broaden the nanny state. Many would seem to be perfectly happy to live under autocratic rule so long as they got what they wanted in the short-term. They may get their desire as the whole system is beginning to resemble the oppressive regime that the founders rebelled against.

The system of patronage and central planning is unsustainable and will ultimately collapse under a mound of unpayable debt. What will Americans do then? Will we unite under principles of liberty or will we fight each other to the bitter end, each person trying to live at the expense of another? To regain peace with one another, we need to rein in the excesses and return to our roots of limited government and the supremacy of individual liberty. That’s the heritage we were left. It was worth fighting for more than two centuries ago, and it's worth preserving today.