Part Two. They have endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of undocumented Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither. They have tried to defund the Multitude of new administrative Offices, and sent hither Swarms of People to harass our Officers, and eat out their Substance. They have abdicated the American Dream, by declaring the 99 percent out of their Protection and allowing the 1 percent to wage War against us. They have permitted big Oil to plunder our seas, ravage our Coasts, burn our Towns, and destroy the Lives of our People. Advertisement They have excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and have endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Hinterland, the merciless Tea Party Activist, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction of all social, scientific, and political Progress that has been achieved in the past 200 Years. Cut out all that stuff about “the Supreme Judge of the World” and “Divine Providence,” throw in a conclusion absolving America from all allegiance to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and voilà! you have a 21st-century declaration for a 21st-century people. Alas, President Obama is unlikely to be this frank. In this regard, he remains a disciple not of Woodrow Wilson but of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who couched his entire statist agenda in the language of the Founding. And so, on this Fourth of July, as on every other day of the year, we must continue to remind our fellow Americans that our Declaration, to say nothing of our Constitution, does not call for the enactment of the entire Democratic-party platform. We must remind them that natural rights aren’t positive economic rights — they are meant to check the powers of the government, not to require others to pay for our health care and contraceptives. We must remind them that natural human equality is synonymous with government by consent, not gay marriage, affirmative action, progressive taxation. or social-engineering schemes to level opportunities and results. We must remind them that the government does not empower the people — instead, the people delegate certain powers to the government. For we believe, with Frederick Douglass, that human beings are born with legs and are not in need of (government-issued) crutches. We must remind them that religious liberty and property rights — not a higher minimum wage and free day care — are inextricably bound up with “the pursuit of happiness.” Lastly, given the aggressive agenda of Obama and his progressive ilk, we must remind all Americans of one of the most underappreciated passages in our great charter of liberty: When the King trampled on the rights of the colonists, our forefathers’ response was to oppose “with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of the People.” — David Azerrad is a research fellow and associate director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics at the Heritage Foundation.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Jul 2013 23:23:01 +0000
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