Six signs of the end of America’s freedoms
Mac thought again. “There are six things that I’d say are sure signs that we’re in trouble.
“First there’s the steady erosion of our basic rights, the ones a lot of people call our constitutional rights, though that’s not a good name for them. It’s better to think of them as natural rights, the way our Founding Fathers did—or think of them as God-given rights if you want. Thinking of them as constitutional rights is part of what is getting us in trouble. You have to realize that our Founding Fathers didn’t think of them as constitutional rights because they knew that if our rights are provided by either the Constitution or the government, what the government gives, it can also take away. As natural or God-given rights, they’re absolute. That’s the way they were intended.
“The next problem we have is related to this erosion of our rights, but I’d treat it as a whole separate category. It’s the unintended consequences of having created new rights—legal rights created by Congress and which Congress and bureaucrats have decided supercede or nullify our natural rights. These include the new rights that have come about as a result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Environmental Protection Act, and the American Disabilities Act. Unlike our natural rights, which come to us at the expense of no one else, the new rights have to be provided by someone else. It’s in having to provide them that our government has found ways to erode our natural rights.
“Third there’s the unconstitutional bypassing of our legislative process by the President—not just this one in office now, but by all of the recent presidents.
“Using what are called Executive Orders, they create laws that are not only illegal and unconstitutional, but are created without the consent of the Congress or the people of the United States. Some of these edicts, believe it or not, explicitly suspend the Constitution for an indeterminate amount of time on the whim of the President.
“Fourth, there’s the new rules and regulations imposed on businesses by our federal government by which the government circumvents our Fifth Amendment rights by insisting businesses spy on us. This includes banks, airlines, and even manufacturers of things like light bulbs and paper.
“Fifth is the creation of a professional, standing army. The Founding Fathers feared a professional army. They believed this country should depend on the militia—and I’m using the word ‘militia’ in the way they used it in the Second Amendment, meaning the body of citizen, not the National Guard or some other professional organization. Professional armies lose their allegiance to the citizenry and have a history of becoming the accomplices of tyrants. It’s highly unlikely there would have been any protests to the illegal war we fought in Vietnam if we’d had a professional army then.
“Last of all, but not least, our economy is no longer a true free market economy. It is now one of the socialist economies. We’re now a fascist economy. For all of our posturing about how bad fascism is, we have created a fascist economy as a compromise between capitalism and communism.
