The Wizard has been rather tired of late, not convinced that the scribings on this blog were making much of a difference. It's hard to keep going at something when you don't think that you're making much of a difference. Life goes on.
Yet, the Wizard does have a three day weekend to celebrate the Fourth of July. The Wizard has worked (and funded) Tea Party rallies on April 15th for the past two years, and it's not hard for the Wizard to think that a better name for April 15th is Dependence Day for many Americans: 50 million Americans collecting Social Security and Medicare benefits, 20+ million Americans are now employed by local, state, or the federal governments of the United States; some 25 percent of Americans now work for private firms that have major contracts with the United States government.
And all of this brings for the question of what are the ends of government?
The Wizard got to sitting down this evening and actually reading through the entire Declaration of Independence. It's not a tough read - only 5 1/2 pages in my pocket version put out by the Heritage Foundation. But then the Wizard started to ponder about it, and that's when things get interesting.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration in three parts. The first is a world famous declaration of rights:
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...
What follows is a list of grievances that the document's signers have against the King and government of Great Britain. The Declaration then concludes with The Declaration that these United Colonies are, and of Right out to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that the Colonials intended to take their place amongst the powers of the Earth.
And so it was, and so they did. Yet, the war between America and Great Britain had been going on since April 1775 with the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but this document didn't get written until July 4th 1776. A period of fourteen and a half months had gone by in between. So what gives?
Well, the overarching problem, at least from the standpoint of the British, was that Britain had been involved with an ongoing rivalry with France and her other European competitors for 250 years for world dominance before the shots were fired on the battlefields of 1775. More proximately, the Seven Years War with France and others had ended with the British having driven the French out as a major power in North America. The problem with this was that the war had left Britain deeply in debt, as wars tend to do to the regimes that get involved in them. So, then it was that the British Parliament decided that the colonials, who enjoyed the protection of the Crown, were going to have to cough up.
The problem with that was that two fold - one was that the Colonials had more or less been taking care of their own affairs for the past 150 years, and secondly, they weren't being given a voice in the decision. History would have been a very interesting thing had Parliament decided to give the Colonials some seats in Parliament in exchange for being taxed.
But the British didn't do this. Among the significant things about The Declaration is something that few people consider - who actually signed it. Look at the list of names - John Adams, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, John Penn, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Morris, Thomas Jefferson, amongst them. These were famous men, men of substance, and part of the accepted establishment. Men who are part of the establishment are not men who are going to do some half cocked off the wall thing like sign a document whereby they were pledging to throw their lives away, without some hope that they are actually going to come through with what they hope to accomplish and their skins intact.
That in turn would explain the 14 1/2 months between the time which the shots were fired on the battlefields of Massachusetts and The Declaration. The signers of The Declaration did something very interesting. By declaring that the States were now sovereign powers, they could now effectively say to all other nation states in the world that this war was not an internal affair of Britain's - a subjugation of impertinent rebels. What this was in fact was a war between sovereign powers, between the nation of Great Britain and the new America. That in turn would have helped encourage other European powers to subtly intervene on behalf of the American colonials, and hence one explanation for the interval between the actual Declaration and the start of the war was that The Declaration had a political motive to it. These conservative men would have no doubt thought that before signing this document that there could be some assurances that they could in fact expect such help from the other European powers, and hence there would be some hope that they could in fact win such a war against the greatest military power on the planet.
But there are other aspects to The Declaration to think about. The list of grievances is pretty long for one. So why did it have to be so long? One thought is that it had to be long and specific enough to enable the signers to say that there were all these grievances that we had. That's to reinforce why they were making the bold step of throwing off the shackles of the Crown and going their own way. Another is that the list would be long enough to encompass all the complaints that would unite all the the Colonials against the Crown.
Then there was the part about The Declaration that Jefferson substituted - that of property. Jefferson wrote that we had inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but not that we had inalienable rights to property. Why did Jefferson not assert this, while earlier John Locke asserted that property was essential to liberty? Well, maybe Jefferson and the rest of the signers of The Declaration didn't want people to think that this was a rich man's war. On the other hand, Enlightenment thinkers were stumbling forward to a more expansive view of humanity, and were starting to think about what owning property really meant. Readers can ponder this matter more here.
But perhaps the most important aspect of The Declaration is that Jefferson also writes that the Colonials have petitioned the King George the Monarch for Redress of their grievances, an ancient thing that humble people all over the world have resorted to since time immemorial. Yet, what has happened? Was it not impossible not to notice that the Redcoated soldiers on American soil were the King's soldiers? By what right could the Colonial rebels decide to declare their independence?
The Wizard heard John Culberson give a talk some months back whereby one of the last of the Founding generation spoke at his deathbed and stated that the reason why the average Joes took up arms against Britain was not because they had read about Montesquieu, or other political theories. It was because they had gotten used to minding their own affairs. But even that is not enough for what is happening now. The real question that the Colonials faced was - what are the ends of government? Why were we seeing the King's soldiers in our streets? Edmund Burke discerned early on that if King George and Parliament went too far with the American colonials, then the Colonials would start to wonder what this was all about, and thoughts like that are the beginnings of rebellion.
The peoples of the British Isles had been thrashing through government for many many centuries before those pesky rebels across the Water decided to ump up and declare their independence. Barely 130 years before, the British themselves had fought their own Civil War, between the supporters of Parliament and the Crown. The overall premise of governing in the United Kingdom eventually evolved into something like, "We the Parliament are the Sovereign Power in this land. We will support the Monarchy, forever, and everything we do will be done in the name of His (or Her) Majesty." Indeed, Great Britain held a general election less than two months ago that looked for a while as though they would return a hung Parliament. One aspect of this was that Queen Elizabeth herself might have had to get involved to resolve the matter, something that would awe Americans. Jefferson wrote that government derived its power from the consent from the governed, an entirely different premise from what the Colonials were being governed under.
America is having to ask that same question today - what are the ends of government? It certainly isn't to support a Monarchy until the end of time! The Progressives have had their answers for the past 100 years, and little by little they have been - well - progressing towards their goals. Progressives say that they want an America that is "fair", but what is fairness? Progressives want an America that is "just", but what is just? Progressives say that America needs to take care of its less fortunate, but by what standard are people less fortunate? More importantly, how long do people need to be taken care of, and who exactly is supposed to be taking care of people? The government? Churches? Or is it families and friends? Or are Americans to start thinking harder about their own futures and taking care of themselves?
In a similar vein, some Conservatives say that America needs to promote Democracy in the world. It will promote the safety of America they say and promote our happiness, but what is it going to take to promote Democracy? Why are we in Afghanistan, and not North Korea or China? Do the ends justify the means, and are those ends a justification at all?
And what are to be the ends of government in America? Are we to have our guns taken away, regardless of how dangerous our neighborhoods are? Are we to be told we can't smoke in a restaurant regardless of what the restaurant owner thinks? Are we told we can only eat what foods the government approves of? Are we to be told we cannot smoke some marijuana? Are we to be told we have to pay taxes because we have accumulated too much wealth? Are we to be told we can only contribute so many dollars to a politician's campaign? Then do these edicts conflict with our unalienable Rights that our Founders declared for us to possess - among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?
So why have many of my liberties been taken away? Are they really for my own good, and what is it all to you anyway? The Wizard thinks that some folks out there have some thinking to do.
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at July 4, 2010 02:11 AM