To the People of the United States:
It has been far too long since I, Publius, has had a discussion with you on the ideas concerning the governance of our Once Great Nation. In our previous discussions, we were in the midst of refining our constitutional relationships as a loosely coupled set of thirteen states. Today, nearly 235 years later, we are a highly interdependent collection of fifty states and five populated territories around the World.
We have come a long way from our early days with our simple understanding of the world, but it seems that we are having some of the same issues as we had in the beginning.
Although we are an interdependent collection of States and Territories, we appear to be a divided collection of individuals seeking to exercise our differences instead of celebrating the things we have in common. The differences that seem to be pervading our public discord seem to be similar to the ones that we wrestled with back then, only they seem to be emphasized by our media in ways that I never imagined possible in the past. As we identified then,
ALL men are created EQUAL,
ALL individuals are entitled to LIBERTY, and
the purpose of government was to protect those two basic INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS.
After I last spoke to you, FRÉDÉRIC BASTIAT, wrote in his call for LIBERTY in France in 1850:
The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!
If this is true, it is a serious fact, and moral duty requires me to call the attention of my fellow-citizens to it.
These words ring truest over the past few decades in our Once Great Nation, with the politicization of almost every difference between individuals and cultural groups within our society. With politicization, has come intervention by those in political position, extending the powers of the state beyond our wildest dreams from so many years ago. The discussion we had then must be had again, so that we can remember and return to our original objectives of being United in Cause and United in Purpose. As we fought along side the minority in the British Common Government, like our friend and English politician, William Pitt, who said,
Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it,
we face a period where these words are no less true than they were when John Acton restated them during his time of tribulation in 1887, with
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.
The corruption today is amongst three primary spheres of our society, the leaders of modern Commerce, the leaders of modern Media, and the leaders of Political Entities from local to international.
There was a time, when we had freshly come out of our own tribulation, which began with these words, written by my friend, Thomas Jefferson:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
These words were true then and they remain true today!
The question before us today is, will this sentiment take us to another Tribulation of the magnitude of the first, or can we use reason and civility to manage this separation more as a reestablishment of our original bonds through the application of Common Sense, Common Causes and Common Purpose. This question not only effects OUR PERSONAL LIBERTY, but like our First Tribulation resulted in the GLOBAL EXPRESSION OF FREEDOM, our response today for our Once Great Nation will be the template for how the rest of the World responds and moves forward. Either we lead them back to FREEDOM or we lead them into GLOBAL CAPTIVITY.
It is up to us to be that light!
It is up to us to be the civilized response to this attack on everything we hold dear!
It is up to us to once again rehash the debates and discussion in our public forum so that all will understand our reasoning and our Common Contract for coming together as a United Community serving our Common Cause and our Common Purpose in the World.
We must have this discussion for FREEDOM unhindered by muzzles of opposition or allowing our words to be guarded so as not to offend each other. We must freely express our concerns, as we did long ago in order to air our grievances and understand each other so that we can identify our Common Purpose over our Individual Bias and Greed.
FREEDOM, as defined by Bastiat, continues to be
Life, faculties, production—in other words, individuality, liberty, property—this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
It is this understanding of FREEDOM upon which this Once Great Nation was formed and upon which we must return our focus in order to survive this Current Tribulation.
Now, I keep referring to our Common Cause and our Common Purpose, so I must elaborate so that those who are observing our discussion will understand what those are. We have covered them in the past, but it is valuable to state them again here, before we proceed any further.
First, our Common Cause is also found in our original treatise against tyranny, of that time, which was then, and even more so today, to
institute [a] Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect [our] Safety and Happiness.
This was not meant then, nor is it now, to mean that this government is to provide Safety and Happiness, rather to enable us to Pursue Happiness in an environment where our LIBERTY was safe from infringement by others, including, as Bastiat stated, safety from the government itself restricting our liberty through extension of the law, when he wrote,
Unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.
To that end, we took the time to form and write down our Common Purpose when we crafted our final Constitution with,
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Our Common Purpose then, as our Common Purpose now is, to limit government to its roll in protecting freedom from being infringed upon. The Constitution, upon which our Once Great Nation was formed, attempted to do precisely that. In fact the first ten amendments made specified those limitations on the Federal Government in order to protect the States’ Freedoms from being infringed upon, however today, it is State and Local Governments who have begun to infringe on Individuals’ Freedoms.
As a Nation, we have forgotten to teach this to our children for several generations now and it is beginning to show. This is why I must have this conversation again, so I will be updating my original letters, known as the Federalist Papers, to address our Current Tribulation and return our focus to our Common Cause and Common Purpose.
Please take the time to consider these letters as I post them over the next many months, as I did so many years ago.
I thank you for your attention in this matter,
PUBLIUS.