A TIME FOR REFLECTION

The American Revolution was a unique time in the history of the world.  A group of people determined that they would establish a nation where the people were to be the sovereign.   The founders determined they would build a nation based on Natural Rights where government had no role except to protect the sacred Natural rights such as live, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness, speech, religion and so many more.  This had not been done before, even in England. 
 
The founders understood that what they were attempting was an experiment.  They also understood that the success of this experiment depended primarily on the integrity and virtue of the people themselves.  The founders understood that this was an individualist system, where all are encouraged to reach their greatest potential based on their honest efforts, and not a collectivist system, where all depended on the rules, laws, and redistributed benefits controlled by and granted by government.  The founders, through the study of history and their own experiences, understood that a nation whose government controlled the lives and thoughts of the people, was a tyrannical government. 
 
I would strongly encourage every American to begin their quest to understand what is happening in our country today, a movement that says the best society is a society where the government controls the lives and thoughts of the people, why it always has and always will end in tyranny.  Please do not depend on bumper stickers to form your opinion, do not listen to pundits who in so many instances know less than you do, but start to study what these brilliant founders said and did, and why they did it. 
 
The founders were not only brilliant at understanding how to establish a government that would serve an individualist nation, but they understood what would happen when people determined their methods were incorrect and collectivism (Marxism, communism, socialism, progressive, and today's Democrats – all virtually the same) began to implement their collectivist ideals. 
 
The Warnings of Thomas Jefferson
During his two terms as President, Jefferson detected some evil and subversive trends which were luring the American people away from the original Constitution. Notice how direct he was in pointing the finger of accusation at the judiciary for corrupting the original constitutional plan: "Our government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit, by consolidation first, and then corruption.... The engine of consolidation will be the federal judiciary; the two other branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments." In other words, the Supreme Court uses its judicial mandates to draw more and more power to Washington; then the Congress and the Executive use this new power to shatter the Constitution and corrupt the dual federalism which was designed to balance the political powers between the government and the states. Once Jefferson's distant cousin, John Marshall, became chief justice of the Supreme Court, Marshall set himself and his associates up as the "final arbiter" on all constitutional issues. Nowhere in the Constitution was the federal judiciary given the power to enforce its will on the states or the other two federal departments. Jefferson had the Supreme Court in his gun sights when he wrote: "The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting with noiseless foot and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the [state] governments into the jaws of that [federal government] which feeds them."

The Warnings of James Madison
Madison was known to be the philosophical soul-mate of Thomas Jefferson, but sometimes his contemporaries considered him somewhat paranoid and suffering from fears for the nation that would never happen. But the passing of time was to prove him more insightful than many of his contemporaries had thought. He said: "If Congress can employ money indefinitely, for the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every state, county, and parish, and pay them out of the public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, the establishing in like manner schools throughout the union; they may assume the provision of the poor.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America."
 
The Warnings of Alex De Tocqueville
In 1830 a young judge from France arrived in America. His name was Alexis de Tocqueville. He came to study the American system. He and his friend soaked up more information about the great American experiment in ten months than most scholars absorb in a lifetime. Returning to France, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a two-volume work entitled, Democracy in America. De Tocqueville saw the people of the United States passing through several distinct stages. First of all, he saw the strength of character and moral integrity that would make them prosperous. But as they became self-sufficient, he saw that they would be less concerned about each other and much less concerned about the principles that made them a great people. This would leave them vulnerable to the manipulation of clever politicians who would begin to promise them perpetual security if they accepted certain schemes contrived by some of their leaders. He then described what modern students have been led to identify as "democratic socialism.": "That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. "For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances -- what remains, to spare them all the care of thinking and the trouble of living." "After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. "The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided -- men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till [the] nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." Are not these warnings sobering? Can we not see every one of them in fulfillment today? Yet in spite of all these dire predictions, the Founders assured us there is a manifest destiny for America that would cause her to rise from the ashes.
 
Were they not spot on?  Remember these were written two hundred years ago.