Founding Wisdom—Part I: Thomas Jefferson

Our country’s birthday is worth celebrating a little longer. In honor of the day I set out to look through my very long quote file for words from our founders. There are a great many words these thoughtful, wise men put to paper or speech—far more than have made their way into my quote file. And there are many good words from people since then, but I need to cut down somewhere to make things sharable, so I limited it to the founders, which leaves out historical wisdom from earlier or later times.

As I scrolled through the file, I found that I had more quotes from Thomas Jefferson than anyone else but probably Thomas Sowell (I used to get a quote from him nearly every week when he was writing his column). I was trying to get a representation from a number of the founders. But every time I told myself that I wasn’t going to include any more from Jefferson, I’d see another that was too good to leave out.

So I made a decision. Today’s quotes all come from Thomas Jefferson—a quiet person who had a way with written words, qualities I relate to (and try to emulate). Then—barring some news event that gets in the way—there will be a part two later in the week with words from several others of the founders. One thing I expect you’ll notice from all of them is how much their belief in God is intertwined with the ideas of freedom they express.

"Declaration of Independence," by John Trumbull
image from Wikipedia

 

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson presidential portrait
by Rembrandt Peale
image from Wikipedia

 

“This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which have never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.  Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular or previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”—Thomas Jefferson

 

"Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence."—Thomas Jefferson (1825)

 

“The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.”—Thomas Jefferson

 

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."—Thomas Jefferson

 

"One man with courage is a majority."—Thomas Jefferson

 

Thomas Jefferson portrait by Thomas Sully, 1821
commissioned by West Point faculty and cadets;
image from Wikipedia

"In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."—Thomas Jefferson

 

"A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."—Thomas Jefferson (First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801)

 

“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.”—Thomas Jefferson

 

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God?”—Thomas Jefferson

 

Almighty God, Who has given us this good land for our heritage; We humbly beseech Thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of Thy favor and glad to do Thy will. Bless our land with honorable ministry, sound learning, and pure manners. Save us from violence, discord, and confusion, from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people, the multitude brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues. Endow with Thy spirit of wisdom those whom in Thy name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that through obedience to Thy law, we may show forth Thy praise among the nations of the earth. In time of prosperity fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in Thee to fail; all of which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.—Thomas Jefferson (Prayer, March 4, 1801)

 

"Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force"—Thomas Jefferson

 

“Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”—Thomas Jefferson

inside the Jefferson Memorial,
from a trip in 2014

 

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

 

What country can preserve its liberty if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? —Thomas Jefferson (November 13, 1787)

 

‎"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."—Thomas Jefferson

 

“I have sworn, upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”—Thomas Jefferson

 

“When once a republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil."—Thomas Jefferson

 

“The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.”—Thomas Jefferson (1781)

 

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.—Thomas Jefferson

inside the Jefferson Memorial,
 from a trip in 2014

 

"A question of some doubt might be raised...as to the rights and duties of society towards its members, infant and adult. Is it a right or a duty in society to take care of their infant members in opposition to the will of the parent? How far does this right and duty extend? To guard the life of the infant, his property, his instruction, his morals? The Roman father was supreme in all these; we draw the line, but where? Public sentiment does not seem to have traced it precisely. Nor is it necessary in the present case. It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father."—Thomas Jefferson (1817, Bill for Establishing Elementary Schools, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Albert Ellery Bergh)

 

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."-- Thomas Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334)

The last hope of human liberty in this world 

rests in us.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1811

I'm a Friend of the Founding

I wasn’t sure I’d post today, on the Fourth of July itself. But, before we head out to do fireworks, I’d like to share just a little bit, in celebration of our country—and our founding documents based on our radical founding ideas.

"The Declaration of Independence," by John Trumbull, 1819
image found here

I was listening to Andrew Klavan the other day[i], and he had a segment that used different words from the Spherical Model, but still a good description of the dichotomy between the northern and southern hemispheres of freedom and tyranny. He talks about the divide specifically as between friends of the founding of America and enemies of that founding.

Andrew Klavan
image found here

So, in honor of the Fourth of July, here’s the transcript of those few minutes:

We know that our country’s divided. But I think we’re using an old template to describe how it’s divided. I stopped using the word “liberal” a long time ago, because there’s nothing liberal about the left. They oppose free speech, free thought, free markets, freedom of religion. The only freedoms they support are the unbridled fulfillments of physical desires, which are guaranteed to turn you into a dependent slave.

So I call them “leftists” now, but maybe leftist isn’t quite right either. It’s kind of an old-fashioned word to describe a European phenomenon.

And what about conservatives? Are we really conservative? Well, we’re sort of conservative. But in America conservatives aren’t about blood and soil, or even really about tradition necessarily, except insofar as our traditions preserve our essential America ideas.

Unlike conservatives in other nations, American conservatives are trying to conserve the most radical political document ever written—the Constitution—which guarantees a limited government of specified powers tasked with guaranteeing the individuals’ right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

So, that’s not really conservative in the usual sense of the word. In fact, what I think we’re seeing is a division between friends of that founding and enemies of that founding. Those of us who believe the creation of the United States in the image of our Declaration and Constitution is the greatest political event in history and therefore worth saving, and those who think, no, we should return to the age-old habit of top-down government or race-based identity politics, rather than the radical politics based on our founding ideas.

You can tell friends of the founding, because they talk about founding ideals. They quote Jefferson. They quote Madison, Adams, Franklin. They wrestle with the original intentions of the Constitution and the underlying principles of the Declaration. We can have passionate but civilized debates about whether a new idea, like gay rights, is antithetical to those founding intentions or is in fact in keeping with them, because we have source materials and writings and foundational ideas we can compare our arguments to, and then move ahead, abandoning out-of-date practices or clinging to those practices that still hold true to the founding.

But the anti-founders, they got nothin’. All they have is an amorphous sense of their own glowing compassion, tolerance, and virtue. So, these empty phrases like “That’s not who we are,” which literally means nothing. They invent mean-sounding words like Islamaphobia or transphobia, which describe utterly nonexistent phenomena; nobody’s phobic about transgender people or Islamic people. They just want to demonize legitimate concerns about whether violence is inherent in Islamic theology and whether sexual identity is eating away at morality, and even sanity.

They address issues of high emotion and zero importance, like use of pronouns or abortion rights for girls who are actually guys[ii]. They’re guided and manipulated by emotive pictures on the left-wing news. Babies dying at the border is a crisis, but babies dying in Chicago, not so much.

Most of all, the enemies of the founding define everything that opposes them as hate. Of course they do. Since they’re defined by their love and their virtue, anyone who’s against them must be hateful, and therefore can be opposed by any means necessary. So the enemies of the founding call the friends of the founding, not just wrong, but evil. And they license their own evil in the process. They call us hateful while they obviously seethe with hate. They call us violent while they assault us and scream at us and spit on us in restaurants. They call us racist while they see everything in terms of race. And they call us fascist while they try to undermine every freedom our founding defends.

Momentary issues and the huge presence of Donald Trump distract us from the essential nature of this division. But, in each issue, each crisis, each argument, it’s important to remember what exactly we’re fighting for, so we can defeat these forces of violence and hate.

---

[i] This was from his podcast Monday, July 1, 2019. The whole podcast is available here. This short segment can be seen on Facebook, here.

[ii] This is a reference to a comment by Julian Castro in the Democratic presidential debate last week. He’s apparently unaware of biology. Afterward, he received praise, at least in our newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, for his breakout, excellent performance.

What the 4th of July Is About

Last week, while we had Little Political Sphere 1 (our granddaughter, the daughter of son Political Sphere) visiting with us, I planned to do a little interview with her. But we were stuffing the week intensely full all week, and I didn’t get to it until on the drive to take her back to her parents.

Me and my granddaughter
at the Water Wall in Houston

She’s almost ten, has just finished 4^th grade. I told her what I wanted to do, to talk about some American history, and she was worried, because they didn’t study that this year. But I thought she did quite well.

I’ve typed up the transcript. We got distracted occasionally. I’ve edited out the GPS interruptions, and the occasional wild diversion. But the rest is here. She knew several answers, and asked good questions. There were things neither of us knew, and she was very quick to look things up on her phone (she just got her phone a few days before her visit to us). I've also added a few clarifications.

Here’s what we—Spherical Model (SM) and Little Political Sphere 1 (LPS1)—think the 4^th of July is about:

SM: All right, so LPS1 and I are talking today about the 4th of July. Tell me what you know about why we celebrate—something—on the 4th of July, and what is it we celebrate.

LPS1: Our independence?

SM: From?

LPS1: Britain.

SM: Yes. Right. Good. So, what happened on that day? How did it become an important day?

LPS1: It became an important day because we got independence from Britain?

SM: What we did—we declared it that day.

LPS1: Oh, we did?

SM: So, you’ve heard of the Declaration of Independence?

LPS1: Yes.

SM: That was signed on that day. They’d been writing it a couple or three days before that, and then they signed it on that day.

Next question: Did everything go fine from that moment on, and Britain said, “OK, fine, you’re independent”? Or did something else happen?

LPS1: I think there was a war.

SM: There was a war. It was already going on by that time, but it went on for…

LPS1: a long time?

SM: Yeah. A year or two, or so. I can’t remember exactly how long. I’ll have to look that up. [The Revolutionary War lasted April 19, 1775—September 3, 1783.]

But it took a while for them to win independence. And it was kind of surprising that they won independence, because Britain was, like, the superpower of the world at the time, and America was just these thirteen little colonies. So you’d think that maybe there was a destiny or a purpose in having the United States of America in the world, and all of the ideas that came with it.

LPS1: So they wouldn’t throw more tea into the ocean?

SM: (Laughter) Do you know why they did that? What that was about?

LPS1: The tea, or…?

SM: Yeah, the tea? Why did they throw tea…? Who threw the tea and why?

LPS1: Because they had—it was the Boston Tea Party, and because they had to pay taxes for tea, I think?

SM: Yes, and they didn’t have representation. Nobody—they didn’t get to send a representative to decide on those things, so they just got charged. It was like, “Well, that’s no fair.”

LPS1: ‘Cause it’s bad for the ocean?

SM: Well, it was only a little bit in the big ocean. But the point was that they didn’t want to buy tea if they had to pay a tax that was an unrighteous tax. So they just said, “We won’t drink tea.”

LPS1: Maybe they should have just given it back.

SM: It was a symbolic demonstration.

Let’s see, so they were taxed when they shouldn’t have been. There were other things that were kind of tyrannical being done against them, so they said, “We want to be a free people. We can govern ourselves. We don’t need a king any longer.” Which was kind of a surprising new idea at that time.

Do you know who any of the leaders were at the time? We call them Founding Fathers.

LPS1: George Washington?

stained glass depicting reading the Declaration of Independence
to George Washington, at the museum at Mt. Vernon

SM: Yes. OK, tell me about George Washington.

LPS1: He was, like, the leader of them?

SM: Yeah. What did he do?

LPS1: He was like a general, and he helped them fight?

SM: Yes, he was. He was the main general of the army of the colonies, and had to hold everybody together, and do the strategy, on very little budget and resources. But he was a very good leader, and so he managed it.

Do you know anything else about George Washington?

LPS1: After the war, he became president, the first President of the United States.

SM: That’s true. Not immediately after the war. It might surprise you to know that there was at least one other president before…

LPS1: Oh yeah. I forgot his name, though.

SM: I did too. Because George Washington was the first President once we got our Constitution, which was about seven or eight years later. So he became the first President that we think of once we got our Constitution.

LPS1: Who was the first president? (She’s looking online on her phone.) It just says George Washington. He was not the first president.

SM: Well, he was the first president once we got our Constitution.

LPS1: But it just says—I asked, “Who was the first president?” in the whole world?

SM: Oh, I don’t know about that.

LPS1: That’s what I’m asking. Here it is. The first—"John Hanson became the first president of the United States of America,” and “not George Washington, was the first president of the United States.” John Hanson.

John Hanson, first President of Congress within the
Continental Congress of the United States,
from Google search screenshot

[Many people have argued that John Hanson, and not George Washington, was the first President of the United States, but this is not quite true. Under the Articles of Confederation, the United States had no executive branch. The President of Congress was a ceremonial position within the Confederation Congress. Although the office required Hanson to deal with correspondence and sign official documents, it wasn't the sort of work that any President of the United States under the Constitution would have done.]

SM: John Hanson. OK. Let’s see. Do you know anything about Benjamin Franklin?

LPS1: He did this kite project.

SM: Yes. He was a scientist, among other things.

LPS1: Yeah. He was a scientist.

SM: Yeah, so he did the kite project. He was one of the people who helped write the Constitution.

Have you heard of John Adams?

LPS1: He was— No, he wasn’t….

SM: He helped write the Declaration of Independence.

LPS1: I was thinking of the…

SM: Actually he encouraged Thomas Jefferson to write it. Do you know who Thomas Jefferson was?

LPS1: Thomas Jefferson was a president?

SM: Yes. So was John Adams.

LPS1: Yeah, he was. They were both presidents.

SM: After George Washington. I can’t remember in what order. James Madison was also one—

LPS1: I know Abraham Lincoln was the 16th.

SM: Yes. He was much later. About 80 years later. “Four score and seven years ago”—87 years. That’s from the Gettysburg Address.

So, let’s see, who else were the others? So, Thomas Jefferson did the writing of the Declaration of Independence, that they signed on the 4th of July, because he was a very good writer. And, I mean he was good at putting words together. He also happened to have really good handwriting. A lot of them did back then. It’s harder to do, ‘cause they had to do it with ink and a quill pen.

LPS1: I’m trying to think of more people, but I keep thinking of someone else that’s in a different country.

SM: Well, let’s see. We’ve got a lot of them: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. Who did I leave out? James Madison. John Hancock—he has the biggest signature on the Declaration of Independence.

LPS1: He just writes big?

SM: Yeah, he wrote bigger than the rest of them. Yeah, really pretty handwriting. And, let’s see, who else am I thinking of? The one from New York that was—  So, when they were discussing things for the Constitution, they wrote newspaper editorials [The Federalist Papers], little pieces for the newspapers to talk about—

LPS1: Wait. They had newspapers?

SM: Oh, yes. They had newspapers back then.

LPS1: How did they get the paper from the trees? They didn’t have any, like, machines.

SM: They did. Well, they didn’t have electrical machines, but they had a lot of machines. And they did— So you wouldn’t get a newspaper maybe every day, but you might get one once a week, and people would pass them around from person to person, so everybody got to see it.

LPS1: So, one newspaper for a whole town?

SM: No. Multiple people in town would buy it, enough people would buy it that the newspapermen could make a living, but they’d have to have people—

LPS1: How big were the towns?

SM: They’d have to take pieces, you know, of the type, and put a letter in separately, and it took quite a while to do it. Um, how big were the towns? Good question. You’d have to look up the numbers to know for certain.

LPS1: I’ll look.

SM: But a town, a big town would probably be 10,000 people, or a really big city maybe 25,000. Like Boston. There were big places, in Virginia and Massachusetts, mainly—

[Philadelphia (40,000) New York City (25,000 people), Boston (15,000), Charleston (12,000), and Newport (11,000)] 

LPS1: How do you divide that, like, newspaper?

SM: Well, people subscribe to a newspaper. Or they buy it at a stand where it’s sold. It’s still kind of done that way, although we do a lot more online now.

So, let’s see. Where were we? So they had these articles they would write for the paper, to discuss the ideas. And everybody could read and understand them, and share their ideas back and forth. Some of the main writers of that were James Madison, John Jay, and—I’m trying to remember the one from New York—Alexander Hamilton.

LPS1: Oh, yeah.

SM: Yes. So, those three mainly, but also some others, would write these articles arguing back and forth the ideas, and how things should work and would work. And then the people would understand too. The people did. They understood all of the things that are in Constitution.

LPS1: That’s cool.

SM: So you could read it. Everybody could read it at that time and understand it. Sometimes we look at it now, and it’s a little bit hard to understand, because language changes over time. But it’s still pretty understandable to read both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Our main law, the Constitution, is only a few pages long, really. It’s about as long as a chapter of a book. And you can read that and understand it. I mean, at your age you might have to ask what a few words mean, but your dad could tell you. ‘Cause he understood it when we were doing school together. He went through it very carefully and wrote out what he understood of all of those—‘cause, you know, your Dad does weird things for fun.

All right. Anything else about the 4th of July we should remember?

LPS1: That it is not only about fireworks.

memories from 4th of July celebrations past

SM: Yes. We do fireworks, ‘cause they’re a celebration, and they’re also reminders that there was war and bombs. But now we’re safe and we just do it for fun. And we do barbecues and go swimming and stuff like that, because we’re free to do that now. Because other people fought for our freedoms. Right?

LPS1: Yeah.

SM: OK, thank you for the interview, young lady.

Handle Fire with Caution

Government is a tool similar to fire. It’s very useful when kept within careful limits. But if left to grow, it can do great harm.

Through most of history, in most parts of the world, government has leaped beyond a fire circle out into the forest, harming the very people who needed just a little of that power.

To some of us, the idea that the fire should be kept within safe boundaries makes natural sense. But there’s a substantial portion of the public who essentially say, “We need more fire. Go ahead and let it burn free. Sure, that’s been bad everywhere it’s been tried, but somehow we'll make it burn just right.”

We need to know the specific bounds to put upon government—and why. And then how.

Think of it as if you’ve just bought a new outdoor grill, one of those high temperature ones that can cook a steak perfectly seared outside without overcooking the inside. In other words, fire is involved. That means some danger. Really high heat. The possibility of getting burned. Fuel is involved.

When used correctly, you get delicious results, and the grill is a blessing to your life. When used casually or carelessly, it can cause burns. Maybe severe burns. Harm to people and environment. 

There’s a comic in the paper making fun of a guy, Crankshaft, who always has mishaps when he brings out the grill for the first time each summer. Some years all the neighbors require warnings. Some years the fire department is on call. Pretty much every year the grill explodes and shoots up into the sky. It’s a comic, so no lives our house are lost in the annual mishap. But you get the idea. What is supposed to be a useful management of fire turns out to be a danger.

Crankshaft comic from September 11, 2018

Often Crankshaft is found pouring lighter fluid on the grill. Too much. He doesn’t follow basic instructions or safety protocol.

If we’re looking at government as the grill—the way of using the fire for good—it would be a good idea to know enough to use it safely. We probably ought to carefully read the instruction book, and be experienced enough to understand basic safety rules such as using oven mitts and long-handled utensils to keep ourselves from getting burned.

We have an instruction book for our country. It’s the US Constitution. It’s short—about the length of a typical grill instruction manual. I keep a pocket version in my wallet.

But what did the Founding Fathers of America do before that was written—when there was “some assembly required” to come up with the right size government that would safely use the fiery power for good? They read a lot of the same things—as though they had all read the Boy Scout handbook on fire safety, plus related wilderness survival guides, and any other sources of wisdom.

The Founding Fathers were a diverse group, with a fairly wide range of educational sources, from somewhat random home tutoring and self-teaching, to a formal Harvard education. Yet, besides reading widely, they covered many of the same materials. You’d be hard pressed to find a founder who hadn’t read:

·         The Bible

·         Classic sources—in their original languages

o   Polybius

o   Cicero

o   Plutarch

o   Aristotle

·         Contemporary philosophers and historians

o   John Locke

o   Thomas Hobbes

o   Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, published 1776)

o   Montequieu

o   Blackstone

o   Gibbons (Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume I published 1776)

·         History

o   Greek and Roman

o   Anglo-Saxon

o   European

o   English

Books were still something of a luxury in the 18^th Century, and yet these men managed to find them in the frontier land of the American colonies—and find the best among many books. They shared them with one another. George Wythe suggested reading for Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson advised and shared books with James Madison. Benjamin Franklin had a study group of friends who studied a wide range of information. While they didn’t all know each other, living in various colonies in times when travel was a bigger challenge than today. But their reading choices were surprisingly uniform. As if a divine teacher had laid out a curriculum for them.

We can be grateful that these men understood both the dangers of too much government power (i.e., coercion, force = tyranny) and just the right amount. Harnessing just the right amount of government power was risky—but it has led to the best outcomes in human history.

In our day, at minimum we should be reading our founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution. In addition, reading The Federalist Papers will give a fair amount of background to the thinking that went into the writing of the Constitution. These were newspaper editorials written mainly by Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton. They didn’t always agree, but they shared the idea that federalism, or distributed power, would work. Then, to see opposing views (those who were very concerned about too much government), you can try The Anti-Federalist Papers, also newspaper editorials attempting to express the dangers they thought the federalists were not fully addressing.

A more contemporary book that addresses the issues the founders faced is Skousen’s The 5000-Year Leap. And I’ve previously listed other suggestions. 

There are resources on government that I think are plain wrong, and harmful; these are about accumulating power over the masses—the opposite of what our Founding Fathers were looking for. They might be worth reading to understand the opposition, however. These include Machiavelli and, closer to our day but surprisingly relevant, Marx and Engels.

Enough time has passed that, along with a good understanding of history, we can see that the work of our founders is not simply theoretical. We can compare.

Just a decade or two ago, Venezuela was the most prosperous, modern country in South America.

screenshot from Stuart Varney report on Venezuela August 2018

Today it looks like a war zone. But without a war. The result is the burn of too much government.

If you want to see the result of too much government even here in our country, take a look at Detroit. I wrote about that here. Last night a friend shared with us a video from early in Steven Crowder’s career, a short documentary on Detroit. And, in the spirit of supporting free speech, after he’s been censored online, I believe unfairly, I’ll end today’s piece with that cautionary tale.

Quote File Sampling

The Spherical Model quote file keeps growing. The Fourth of July got me thinking, even more than usual, about how the political, economic, and social spheres all interrelate. So, with that in mind, here’s another sampling from the quote file:

"Declaration of Independence"
painting by John Trumbull

You will think me transported with enthusiasm, but I am not. I am well aware of the toil, and blood, and treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration [of Independence], and support and defend these States. Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is more than worth all the means, and that posterity will triumph in that day's transaction, even although we should rue it, which I trust in God we shall not.—John Adams, July 3, 1776

"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

—Benjamin Franklin, July 4, 1776

Happiness, whether in despotism or democracy, whether in slavery or liberty, can never be found without virtue.—John Adams

All the principles of science are of divine origin. Man cannot make or invent or contrive principles. He can only discover them, and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.—Thomas Paine

Without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life.—Dwight D. Eisenhower

No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.—Samuel Adams

This is still God’s world. The forces of evil, working through some mortals, have made a mess of a good part of it. But it is still God’s world. In due time, when each of us has had a chance to prove ourselves—including whether or not we are going to stand up for freedom—God will interject himself, and the final and eternal victory shall be for free agency.

And then shall those complacent people on the sidelines, and those who took the wrong but temporarily popular course, lament their decisions.

To the patriots I say this: Take that long eternal look.

Stand up for freedom, no matter what the cost. Stand up and be counted. It can help to save your soul—and maybe your country.—Ezra Taft Benson

Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”—Martin Luther King, Jr. (quoting 19th Century abolitionist Theodore Parker)

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him." — G.K. Chesterton

No enactment of man can be considered law, unless it conforms to the law of God.—William Blackstone

The only way we can keep our freedom is to work at it. Not some of us. All of us. Not some of the time, but all of the time. So if you value your citizenship and you want to keep it for yourself and your children and their children, give it your faith, your belief, and give it your active support in civic affairs.—Spencer W. Kimball, Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, 405; from an address given at the Rotary Club, SLC, UT, June 8, 1976

Random Quotes

My quote file continues to grow. I add a quote every few days. Over eight years or so, that adds up. It’s the length of a short book. I don’t think I’ve done a post straight from the quote file since last November. So maybe it’s time for another sample.

I thought I’d offer up the last several. As always, they are somewhat random. Not so random that some are on cooking or cleaning. But random while related to The Spherical Model somehow, which covers the political, economic, and social spheres, so that covers a lot of ground. I collect them so I can read and think through these thoughts again. I hope you find them worth reading, and maybe keeping, as well.

“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”—James Madison, Federalist 51

“A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion; to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind—if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else—then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.”—C.S. Lewis

“Truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny.”—Frank S. Meyer

"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers."—John Adams

“How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively. Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; Apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the Talisman of moral people.”—Walter E. Williams

“[T]he whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”—Henry Hazlitt

"The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets."—Will Rogers

“Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government—in pursuit of good intentions—tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the costs come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.”—Milton Friedman

“The Constitution is not a living organism. It’s a legal document, and it says what it says and doesn’t say what it doesn’t say.”—Justice Antonin Scalia

One doesn't fight only when one is optimistic. One fights because it is the right thing to do, and because America remains, as Lincoln said, "the last best hope of earth."—Dennis Prager, “A Dark Time in America,” May 3, 2016

It’s easy to be an American liberal. All that is required are hypocrisy and ignorance.

Ignorance is an absolute must, but especially ignorance of three things: economics, human nature and all of recorded history.—Matt Patterson, American Thinker, 9-5-2016 “How to Be a Liberal”

“Who in their right mind looks at the Internet and says ‘You know what we need? We need Russia, China, and Iran to have more control over this.’”—Ted Cruz

“Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.”—Walter Williams

“Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what happened once in 6,000 years may not happen again.”—Daniel Webster

“A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.”—Samuel Adams (1776)

Timeless Constitution

Saturday was the 229th anniversary of our US Constitution. That’s remarkable, considering written constitutions in countries around the world have lasted an average of 17 years, since 1789. 

Several days ago I listed to an Uncommon Knowledge interview titled “Is the Constitution Out of Date?” Since the answer, to me, is obviously NO, I expected maybe something valuable I could share for Constitution Day. While Uncommon Knowledge offers a variety of opinions, they’re usually in the range we think of as conservative. The interview was with political scientist Terry Moe, author of the recent book Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government—and Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency. He has been a fellow at the Hoover Institute. So I was surprised when his premise was that the Constitution is outdated. He made claims that we usually hear only from the opposition.

One of his main complaints was that the executive branch doesn’t have enough power. After nearly eight years of Obama’s illegal executive orders, that seems wildly wrongheaded. He suggests that the president should be able to put forth his agenda items, and get them fast tracked through the legislature. The legislators could still vote these things down, but they’d be required to put them up for a vote, without amendment, within a certain length of time.

If that was to be the only change, I might not put it in the southern hemisphere of statist tyranny. But he also asserts that because we are a democracy, we ought to make it easier to enact the will of the majority.

I was waiting for Peter Robinson, the interviewer, to say, “But we’re not a democracy.” I guess he was just trying to allow the interviewee to get his point across, but it got me talking back at the screen.

We are not a democracy—i.e., government by majority rule—we are a constitutional republic. That means we have a written law limiting government, to prevent the majority from imposing injustices on the minority. For example, an evil majority might choose to enslave a particular minority group; in a democracy, the majority vote would rule.

Our Constitution purposely limits government, and purposely lists some of our God-given rights that government must not infringe upon, and adds that any powers not enumerated as given to the federal government are maintained by the states or the individual citizens. That is on purpose.

Moe thinks the Constitution is just a relic of a formerly simpler society, when America was smaller and more agrarian. That those simpleton founders couldn’t possibly have prepared for our complex, technological society.

I’ve been reviewing Hillsdale College’s Western Heritage 101 course (free online), and listened to lecture 4 this week, on Socrates and Plato—which were read and understood by our founders. All of them. The founders heeded the Greeks’ warnings about the despotism of democracy.

In the follow-up Q&A session, lecturer Terrence Moore gives an example of how democracy leans despotic (starting at about 13:40):

You might say, “Well, we’ve gotten beyond that. We’re America. We can handle this.” Today is the day after the election. It’s Wednesday, and I’m reading an editorial that comes straight out of The Washington Times. Here is what it says.

“The most disturbing issue of the election was how President Obama managed to win re-election in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan by talking about the highly unpopular bailout of General Motors, by taking billions of dollars in hard-earned money from taxpayers during a deep recession and giving it to a couple of huge companies, Obama managed to buy the votes he needed to eke out a re-election.”

“Taxpayers remain on the hook to the tune of $25 billion.”

That’s just the reporting, but here is what happened behind it, according to this author.

“This is the Achilles heel of a democracy. Politicians simply tax those who do not support them and give the money to those who do or give the money to those they would like to have support them. It is the end of the line. Game over.”

That’s a pretty bleak after-election sentiment, but it would not have surprised Plato, and it would not have surprised the Founding Fathers. So, among other things, the recent election should cause us to think very hard constitutionally about what kind of framework of government the Founding Fathers set up so that elections can’t be bought with other people’s money.

If it’s that kind of democracy, which is the kind that Plato describes, we’re in trouble.

So, we aren’t—or shouldn’t be—a democracy. Our Founding Fathers knew better. They purposely set up a government to avoid tyranny of the majority, which is easily swayed by lies, money, or enticements.

The progressive arguments are only worth considering if human nature has changed since our founding—or since Plato. Progressives seem to have a bias against anything that isn’t contemporary, which is a closed-mindedness that pretty well disproves their assertions.

Progressive arguments against the Constitution aren’t new; they’ve been around at least since the late 1800s to early 1900s, from the onset of the “progressive” movement. In other words, opposition to the Constitution has been claiming it is outmoded for about as long as the Constitution existed without that argument against it.

It is probably true that opposition to freedom has been claiming the Constitution was somehow inadequate since day 1.

Yet, unlike most of the constitutions in the world, ours continues. And to those who appreciate the skilled precision with which it was written, it is as timely today as it was in 1787.

As I was considering how to refute the claims of Terry Moe, the next morning I came across a piece with the title “No, the ConstitutionIsn’t Outdated,” by John York for the Daily Signal. My first thought was that York must be refuting the same interview I had seen. He isn’t; he just happens to refute Moe’s claims, because they are the standard attempts to denigrate our Constitution by those who would like us to have less freedom.

York lays out the basic argument and refutes it:

As Richard Stengel, former president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, wrote in a splashy 2011 article in Time Magazine:

Here are a few things the Framers did not know about: World War II. DNA. Sexting. Airplanes. The atom. Television. Medicare. Collateralized debt obligations. The germ theory of disease. Miniskirts. The internal combustion engine. Computers. Antibiotics. Lady Gaga.

Stengel’s list is instructive as it gives the reader a sense of the changes liberals think our Constitution does not adequately account for. Take for instance: “airplanes, the atom, the internal combustion engine, and antibiotics.” These all represent technological or scientific innovations unknown to the Founders that, purportedly, have some relevance to structuring a government.

Some scientific and technological changes do require that we think carefully about the Founders’ intent when they were writing the Constitution. For instance, new technologies allow police to peer into homes without physically entering them, intercept an email or a text message, or track your car from their computer back at the precinct. Whether these things constitute a search or seizure of citizens’ “houses, papers, and effects” under the Fourth Amendment is an important question the Founders do not answer for us directly.

But by no means are we merely left to guess how the Constitution speaks to these modern conditions. Through the Founders’ own writings contained in the Federalist Papers, notes on the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention and correspondence, thoughtful judges and legal scholars get a clear sense of the spirit behind the words on the page.

Given the Founders’ concern that government would use warrantless searches to harass and condemn political dissidents, it is hard to imagine James Madison or Alexander Hamilton would approve of warrantless wiretaps, drone flyovers, and email dragnets conducted by federal agencies.

Much of the rest of York’s piece deals with social/cultural issues. And he reassures on that front as well:

While the Constitution was not meant to steer the development of American culture in every sense, the Founders did think a free society demanded certain qualities of character among the citizenry: habits of self-governance, respect for the rights of others, and reverence for the law. But within those brackets is allowed some latitude for culture to develop organically and locally without the heavy hand of government at the helm.

If he were using Spherical Model terms, he might have said that the culturally civilized ability to rule ourselves is a necessary prerequisite to freedom and prosperity. It’s close to what James Madison meant in Federalist 51, which York also quotes:

From Federalist 51, image from here

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

I agree with York’s final conclusion, that

human nature is still as fallible as it was 229 years ago. Thankfully, our nation was blessed with a generation of men who had insight to perceive the essential character of man vis-à-vis government and the wisdom to craft institutions rooted in those unchanging realities.

I thank God for the miracle of our Constitution, and the men who were prepared to write it. I pray that we can honor God by appreciating and restoring that miracle.