United Liberty
This Is Not The Time For Revolution
Sun, 03/28/2010 - 9:40am | posted by Kevin Boyd
Since Obamacare was passed, tensions in this country have been running high. Congressmen, especially those who voted for the bill, have been targeted with vandalism and death threats. In turn, many radicals on the left have threatened conservative personalities, issuing their own death threats to Republican congressmen, and used the opportunity to condemn all Obama opponents as racists and fascists among other things. Honestly, we in the opposition have not condemned this violence enough and instead we have sought to change the focus towards things said by the left. In addition, our continued tolerance of such lunatics like Birthers and 9/11 Truthers lends credience to the smears of the left.
For those of you out there who think this is the time for revolution, please consider the following:
1) All political and legal options have not been exhausted. There are Congressional elections in November 2010 and Presidential elections in November 2012. Use this anger and energy to donate money and support candidates who support liberty and who will fix/repeal Obamacare. In addition, many states have filed lawsuits challenging Obamacare and those lawsuits need time to work their way through the courts.
2) The right to free speech and to petition grievances is still in effect. Obamacare opponents can still express their opposition views to the public. Such views are common place on talk radio, the Internet, the newspapers, and as a matter all over the place. Obamacare opponents are not being thrown in jail or being silenced by the state.
3) Obama and the Democrats did win the past two elections and have a mandate. Obama’s election victory in 2008 and the Democratic control of Congress by definition gives them the mandate to pass whatever legislation they want, as long as it is upheld as legal. That mandate can only be revoked by their electoral defeat in 2010 and 2012.
4) The Founders did not intend for revolution over trival matters. Before the Founders declared independence, there were numerous attempts at resolving the crisis with the British peacefully. Make no mistake, Obamacare is a trival matter in the scheme of things and does not rise to the matter of “taxation without representation”. The major reason why some Americans threaten revoluton over trival matters is the fact that after the last Civil War, the Union was far too kind to the former Confederates. By all rights, the Union should have executed the remnants of the Confederate government and the Confederate general staff for treason. Maybe this would have detered the trivialization of revolution that we see in this country.
What those of us who love liberty need to do is step back and channel our anger into more productive means than dreaming about and threatening revolution. We need to build our own political mandate, a mandate for liberty.
I fully agree. I also wanted to add that revolution would be a horrible idea for anyone with a love of small government. This government, as over-reaching and bloated as it is, would expand exponentially as it enacts a bunch of dormant clauses to allow for Martial Law and a police state from sea to shining sea. Revolution should be like war: never off the table but always the last resort.
If the usurpation of individual liberty by a out-of-control centralized power is a “trivial matter” then excuse me.
I forgot how easy it was to get a third party candidate or the ballot or how many choices “we the people” had between the corporate shills of either party.
My bad. Soon via governmental schooling we’ll have educated the majority of non-thinking albeit useful idiots into sentinel protectors of individual liberty.
Did I mention I have unicorns in my basement.Really!
Get a grip on reality.The hope for end of corporate tyranny by Federal force is to be had in the complete bankruptcy of the Federal government succeeded by a secession of sovereign States from the Federal government.
And then and only then can the Remnant begin to rebuild the decades of destruction visited upon fiscal responsibility and rule of law by a small group of liberty bashing elitists masquerading as government “by the people, for the people.
But,keep dreaming of voting the corporate sponsored vermin out of office and shrinking centralized government .
After all,it gives purpose to otherwise empty cause and hope to the frustrated and delusional.
Ron Paul gets it.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/54569.html
“By all rights, the Union should have executed the remnants of the Confederate government and the Confederate general staff for treason.’
By God you are a dumb maleducated ass.
Lincoln was no different than Hilter,Stalin , Mao and Pol Pot.
His Union army of barbarians already invaded a peaceful country , destroyed, stole murdered and raped their way across the countryside and still after all the looting and genocide committed that wasn’t enough for you.
It’s pseudo Libertarians such as yourself that turn people interested in small government and de-centralized power off to the cause.
I’m am completely amazed at how little people really know about the War of Northern Aggression.I’m not supsised that you were not taught the truth a Public ED , but there is the internet and you can read can’t you?
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo-arch.html
Rebuttal to comments
#1 Uh, so if we can manage to replace 10 - 78 from each house come November, then all will be OK, and the path to our salvation will be at hand. Yippee!
#2 Um, Did you see the Friday ed shultz show, where he and a koolaid drinker were calling Glenn Beck a terrorist and other vile things? Obama attempted to shut down Fox news? SEIU and ACORN attacking at the behest of Obama Tea Party members and Town Hallers. Perhaps not enough of our side’s blood has been spilled to get thier attention?
#3 Er, is chris matthews or keith olberman writing this stuff? Hello, Legislature passes what the people demand, or so it is supposed to be in this Constitutional Republic, and after a year the polls still clearly and plainly show the US people DO NOT want Obamacare.
#4 Obamas Federal Leviathan was born under the heel of Lincoln, except now we are in the mid point of the new United Socialist States of Amerika. From Maxine Waters “Socialist” slip, to Biden’s “we are gonna take over the Insurance Companies” and Obamas “Share the Wealth” pledge, Carl Marx is sure one proud fellow right about now, along with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chevez
CheBurner, you unlike the coward who won’t write his or her quasi-literate rant under his name, actually have something worth rebutting.
Response to your #2: Who cares what Ed Schultz, et al say? Also, where and when has Obama attempted to shut down Fox News? I must have missed that one on the manufactured outrage de jour the right serves up.
Response to your #3: Regardless of what the polling says, it still does not nullify the Obama and the Democratic mandate. Only an election does. If the American people truly hate this bill, the Democrats are done in the midterms.
Response to your #4: So what’s your point?
3
A couple of thoughts on what you have posted here. I applaud you for attempting to tamp down violence and talk of revolution. The time has not yet come for violence.
But I feel like you made a mistake or two. First the Democrats do not have a “mandate”. To do so would mean that you believe they are acting within the wishes of the majority of the American people. They clearly are not as polls consistently show that most Americans disagree with the health care bill. A mandate is what happens when the people are behind your plan, not what happens when you ignore the voice of the people and do whatever you want. Obama swept into power on vague promises of hope, change, and transparency. None of that has been done thus far. He had a mandate to change the way Washington worked. That was his only mandate.
Democrats do not have the right to vote whatever legislation they want. Our country was not built on the idea that whatever political party won an election is then free for the next two years to do whatever they like. It was built as a Representative Republic, where the representatives do the express will of the public. You are mistake to believe that either party has the right to pursue their agenda doggedly once an election is done. They still work for us, not the other way around. To be truthful the two parties should be abolished.
And what we are seeing today is not “trivial”. Over the last 100 years, the federal government has stripped us of our rights, liberties, and our voice. The only voice they answer to is the party leadership. Obamacare is simply the latest issue. The original revolution began over small issues with big consequences. The taxing of tea would be considered a small, trivial issue. But it was a symptom of an oppressive British rule over the colonies, so we threw off those chains. The founders absolutely called for revolution under the current situation. From the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
I will have an article up tonight discussing individual liberty on my site. I welcome any who wish to RESPECTFULLY debate the issues. We have a couple thousand visitors a day from all sides of the political spectrum. The site is Stand Up For America and can be found at:
http://standupforamerica.wordpress.com
Good article!
USWeapon
We’ll just vote them all out come Nov……replace them that are with those that ain’t.
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igbBItLemsM
@ Kevin Boyd
“CheBurner, you unlike the coward who won’t write his or her quasi-literate rant under his name”
LOL..and CheBurner is a legal name or just another anon ID? Do you even understand the definition of “anonymous.”
You are the intellectual coward here for not being able to comprehend the fact that membership in the Union of States was voluntary and regardless how you feel about the Confederacy of Southern States the citizens of those states had a legitimate right to succeed.
And apparently from his speech on the House Floor in 1848 Lincoln believed that the people still had the right to change government in the event that government became unwieldy and oppressive.
“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right – a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.”
— Abraham Lincoln January 12, 1848
I’m sure you’ve heard of Walter Williams, a registered
Republican, but still more of a Libertarian than one as ignorant of the historical significance of the Southern States attempting to assert their independence from the economical tyranny of the North as you.
DiLorenzo Is Right About Lincoln
by Walter E. Williams
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/w-williams1.html
” Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was little more than a political gimmick, and he admitted so in a letter to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase: “The original proclamation has no…legal justification, except as a military measure.” Secretary of State William Seward said, “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free. ” Seward was acknowledging the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to slaves in states in rebellion against the United States and not to slaves in states not in rebellion.
The true costs of the War between the States were not the 620,000 battlefield-related deaths, out of a national population of 30 million (were we to control for population growth, that would be equivalent to roughly 5 million battlefield deaths today). The true costs were a change in the character of our government into one feared by the likes of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and Calhoun – one where states lost most of their sovereignty to the central government. Thomas Jefferson saw as the most important safeguard of the liberties of the people “the support of the state governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies.”
No one can say what the ramifications of secession of the Southern States from the Union would have led to in respect to liberty and justice , but only a maleducated statist would deny the States the right under rule of law an attempt at Independence from the economic tyranny of Federal power.
Wasn’t economic freedom exactly what the war for independence from British rule fought over?
The non-existent issue of slavery leading up to the War between the
States was about as sorry excuse at waging war on an innocent populace as Saddam’s WMDs was in leading up to the invasion of Iraq.
Slavery was on the way out in the South due to the cost basis of keeping slaves fed ,clothed , housed and in good health versus the return on crops produced just as it had expired under it’s own weight in every civilization wherein it was instituted
The re-unification of Southern States via whole scale slaughter of humanity is a tad bit extreme by any measure of civilized society, don’t you think?
If the force of State via genocide and destruction is the way you roll, then why not be honest about it and stop pretending to support liberty by hiding behind the faddish mantle of Libertarianism.
Be true to yourself.
Please do yourself a favor and study more of the issues concerning liberty and the rule of law leading up the the War of Northern Aggression before waxing so non-eloquently on something you clearly do not understand.
Anonymous,
If you want to continue the Confederacy, that’s all well and good. Keep in mind though, you’re not defending some glorious band of freedom fighters fighting against Yankee oppression. Instead, you’re defending a nation that was created for the purpose of defending the enslavement of human beings solely on the account of their skin color. Plus, the Confederacy was created because the member states refused to accept the results of the Election of 1860.
I’m sorry, Kevin, but you’re demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of what the Civil War was all about. It’s not entirely your fault; most non-southern states teach that it all centered around the evils of slavery.
It didn’t.
For one thing, if slavery was The Great Evil, how come the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the southern states? Why were there northern states who still practiced slavery?
Slavery was already on its way out in the south. It would have died off on its own within a couple decades at the most. The civil war was fought over states’ rights, plain, pure and simple.
Please educate yourself.
“Keep in mind though, you’re not defending some glorious band of freedom fighters fighting against Yankee oppression. Instead, you’re defending a nation that was created for the purpose of defending the enslavement of human beings solely on the account of their skin color. Plus, the Confederacy was created because the member states refused to accept the results of the Election of 1860.”
Again you reveal your ignorance of the true history of the War of Northern aggression , preferring instead to spout the popular revisionist version instead.
Talk of secession fueled by economic imbalances was commonplace amongst Southern and Northern States alike since the ratification of the Constitution and culminating into a full blown revolt by a Confederacy of Southern States in 1861.
The issue of a Northern tax on foreign imports coming into
Southern states was an hot issue in 1832 during the Jackson administration with South Carolina passing an Ordinance of Nullification declaring they would collect the import tax for the Federal government which prompt led led to Jackson sending Federal troops to Charleston.
The industrialized North desired a market for their manufactured goods,but the cash flush agricultural based Southern States found it cheaper to import their goods from abroad , which prompted the Federal Government to force the sale of Northern goods on the South by taxing the imported goods out of the range of affordability which only fanned the flames of hostility felt betwixt the Northerners and Southerners.
This subject is a bit much for a comment post and many books have been written the subject , but the jest of the matter is that you are wrong in your assumption that the war of 1865-1865 between the states was about slavery.Slavery was an minor issue , but the issue leading up to the total destruction of entire region was on of economics centered around trade.
The North allowing the South to leave the Union in peace could have possibly meant economic disaster for the North if unfair trade agreements could not have been worked out between the two parties , but instead of a diplomatic solution of granting independence to soverign
States,the north chosethe path of total war waged against the soldiers and citizens alike.
“The war is being fought for the Union, not slavery…I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
Abraham Lincoln First Inaugural Speech on Mar.14th, 1861
Lincoln on taxes:http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/young8.html
“[I cannot] tell the reason… [but high tariffs will] make everything the farmers [buy] cheaper.”
“I was an old Henry-Clay-Tariff Whig. In old times I made more speeches on that subject than any other. I have not since changed my views.” ~ Lincoln, in a letter to Edward Wallace, Oct. 11 1859
“If I do that, what would become of my revenue? I might as well shut up housekeeping at once!” ~ Lincoln, in response to the suggestion by the Virginian Commissioners to abandon the custom house of Fort Sumter. Housekeeping is a euphemism for federal spending, in otherwords, taxing consumers to subsidize special interests, or what we would call today, corporate welfare.
“But what am I to do in the meantime with those men at Montgomery [meaning the Confederate constitutional convention]? Am I to let them go on… [a]nd open Charleston, etc., as ports of entry, with their ten-percent tariff. What, then, would become of my tariff?” ~ Lincoln to Colonel John B. Baldwin, deputized by the Virginian Commissioners to determine whether Lincoln would use force, April 4, 1861
‘Above all else, Lincoln was a tax and spender, and loved the Union because it would allow him to tax the South to spend on “internal improvements” in the North.”
Don’t be coy,this post is not an effort to champion the Confederacy or even advocate another one , but to point out the historical truth that the duly elected leaders of the Southern State were within their rights as established government of their people to throw off the yoke of an oppressive and centralized government
If you care naught for the truth , but continue to cling to your delusion that Norths aggressive war against the Southern State was not motivated by greed and the pursuit of wealth, but by a pious desire of Lincoln’s to “free the slaves” then so be it.
But, then it is odd for a so called libertarian to be championing the tyranny of unlimited centralized power….go figure.
“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”
I ain’t gonna; love em’ that’s’ for certain shore’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_riP7dvrAFI