Happy Independence Day

July 4, 1776. 233 years ago, count them. This is when a small group declared its opposition to the familiar history of most of humanity. The opposition to the tyranny of a king who had no right to rule over these guys who lived so far away anyway. And why did he have no right to rule over them? Because the only natural way for government to have any authority is for it to be granted by the people. That is the principle upon which this nation was founded. Our own history is hypocritical, as is that of any individual or of any thing produced by mankind. But to never forget this principle is what I'm thinking about today. Thinking about never forgetting.

This is not a principle to forgive and forget. It has no need to be forgiven. Yet we have done just that, as though it were a sin. That's what I believe, anyway. And we continually forget about this and the other major principles that the Founders talked about.

What needs to be forgiven (first acknowledged as a sin) and not forgotten is the ridiculously absurd treatment of the people who already lived on the continent. The main conflict was the principle of private property against public property; but you can't start acknowledging the principle of private property just after having stolen property from someone else. This is not acceptable and must be remembered as one of the many stains and scars that this nation has to its name.

It's all about "certain unalienable Rights, ...among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.__...[T]o secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Thoreau talked about this, about not being part of any nation that he did not consent to be part of, even if he was born into it... funny that nobody ever talks about Thoreau as being a libertarian, God forbid anyone would suggest something like that. I haven't read much about him or by him lately, but I recall him refusing to pay taxes going towards the Mexican War... you do that today for the Iraq war and people call you crazy. Or you do that for other reasons and people call you a right-wing nut.

I don't think I'm necessarily a libertarian in terms of state government. If a state needs to regulate companies that have monopolies over electricity, or needs to provide or give funds to decent welfare programs for people that end up on the streets because they get messed up from being victims of abuse (and of course this isn't all of them, but how many of them!), then I can believe that. I'm NOT fine with that in terms of the federal government. It's clear to me that the system of government was specifically designed to give very little power to the federal government and give all other powers to the states, where the people can more easily control these powers that can be so handily wielded against them. Obviously enough, nobody has any respect for the separation of Federal and State today, which is something that is probably a direct product of people arguing that "states rights!" is a racist product of the dissatisfaction in the South after the Civil War. No, these rights were understood before and probably even well after that time. If you want inefficient welfare that'll leave people hanging, departments in the executive branch that unfairly bias farming companies with lobbyists and provide education programs that mess up local control of education, then that's what you're bound to get with a strong central government. And horrid economic troubles are what you can get with an INVINCIBLE central bank.

That's what I believe, regardless of whether I'm educated enough to back it all up. Nobody's really educated enough to back up everything that they believe, especially in the political arena.

At least the Declaration of Independence is behind me, with the Constitution backing it up. May "Nature's God" (see last sentence) bless America.

And happy Independence Day!