Restoring Freedom - Part three

Go here for parts one and two of this series.

The tyranny of unrealistic expectations

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
- Thomas Jefferson

The rebels of 1776 threw off a government they saw as too involved in everyday life. The later debates over the scope of national power gave us the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers -- among the finest distillations of Western political thought, though you wouldn't know it today by the attention they get in public education.

Unlike today, no one in Philadelphia talked about mitigating the uncertainties of life, or ensuring an equal outcome for all. The Declaration of Independence talked about enabling the pursuit of happiness...not the guarantee of it.

In this, the American Revolution differs vastly from the French Revolution and its mantra of "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality." The Founders acknowledged all people are created equal (value); the French demanded material equality. This difference in philosophy drove very different experiences, as both the guillotine and recent student protests can attest. The idea government can force equality of result in life took root with Marx, Lenin, and other statists who bore very bitter and bloody fruit.

But if ‘war is the health of the state,’ the past 100 years provided fertile ground for that bitter fruit to grow even in the ‘land of the free.’ From World War One to the Wars on Poverty and Terror, Americans have ceded ever more power to their government in return for the dubious promise it will set all to rights. This is contrary to our ancestors’ views on the subject. We would do well to remember Ben Franklin’s admonition that “they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither.”

Life involves risk and reward, work and woe. No government, however powerful, can change that reality. It can restrain threats from without and within, but it cannot create the New Model Man. Will our descendants curse us for selling our birthright of liberty for government-supplied prescription drugs and internet access? Is this the modern "bread and circuses?" As Washington said, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” We give that master more power over our daily lives at our own peril…and the chagrin of the rebels of 1776.