"Posterity, you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that ever I took half the pains to preserve it." -John Adams


Welcome to Patriot's Lament. We strive here to educate ourselves on Liberty. We will not worry ourselves so much with the daily antics of American politics, and drown ourselves in the murky waters of the political right or left.
Instead, we will look to the Intellectuals and Champions of Liberty, and draw on their wisdom of what it is to be a truly free people. We will learn from where our Providential Liberties are derived, and put the proper perspective of a Free Individual and the State.
Please join us!

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Liberty vs. the Constitution: The Early Struggle

I have often opined that if we actually would get back to 1787, I would much prefer it to today's government. Basically because Thomas Jefferson was still around, and the principles of Liberty were not totally lost on the Jeffersonian Republicans (not to ever, and may it never be, mistaken for the "republican party" of Lincoln and today.)
I still like to think of the time when total Liberty, or in another term, ANARCHY, ruled America, and for 11 whole years, when Jefferson penned that Man should and, of Right, ought to be Free, with the God-given Right of Life, Liberty, and Property, the Declaration of Independence.
For 11 years Americans were a free people. Then, some folks that the American people like to glorify, decided to make a constitution. Now, the delegates that ratified the Constitution had no authority from the people who sent them there to do so; they were merely supposed to strengthen the Articles of Confederation, yet monetary and mercantile interest proved the day.
And won.
It had been drafted, in the first place, by men representing special economic interests. Four-fifths of them were public creditors, one-third were land speculators, and one-fifth represented interests in shipping, manufacturing, and merchandising. Most of them were lawyers. Not one of them represented the interest of production — Vilescit origine tali.

Hamilton's first move was for funding all the obligations of the government at face value, thereby putting the interests of the speculator on a par with those of the original holder, and fusing both classes into a solid bulwark of support for the government. This was inflation on a large scale, for the values represented by the government's securities were in great part — probably 60 percent — notoriously fictitious, and were so regarded even by their holders. A feeble minority in Congress, led by Madison, tried to amend Hamilton's measure in a small way, by proposing a fair discrimination against the speculator, but without success.

 Hamilton's bill contained a supplementary measure which reached out after the state creditors, united them with the mass of federal creditors, and applied a second fusing heat. The several states which had at their own expense supplied troops for the Revolutionary army, had borrowed money from their citizens for that purpose; and now Hamilton proposed that the federal government should assume these debts, again at face value — another huge inflation, resulting in "twenty millions of stock divided among favored States, and thrown in as pabulum to the stock-jobbing herd," as Mr. Jefferson put it.

 The point being, while we do face adversity, and the Rights of Man have been and are trampled, to say that one would want to "go back" is to be ignorant of fact.
Instead, let's "MOVE FORWARD." Just as Jefferson did with John Locke.
Let's take the lessons learned from the good of the Founders, and take the good from the dissidents of this Country that promoted Liberty VS. Statism, (Spooner, Tucker, Rothbard) and let us progress to a New Liberty, one of Individualism, Voluntarism, and the Golden Rule.

Read the rest of Albert Jay Nock's "Liberty vs. the Constitution" here.




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