ThomasJefferson – ILANA MERCER

A July Fourth Toast To Thomas Jefferson—And The Declaration

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 04:47:11 +0000

“Let us, then, toast Thomas Jefferson—and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that sired and inspired him.”—ILANA MERCER, July 4, 2019

The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate—has been mocked out of meaning.

To be fair to the liberal Establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked “through the night” to set the full text on “a handsome folio sheet,” recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in Liberty And Freedom. And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the “people be universally informed.”

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it “an expression of the American Mind.” An examination of Jefferson‘s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of the collective mentality of the D.C. establishment, “American” in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig—an American Whig whose roots were in the English Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

By “all men are created equal,” Jefferson, who also wrote in praise of a “Natural Aristocracy,” did not imply that all men were similarly endowed. Or that they were entitled to healthcare, education, amnesty, and a decent wage, à la Obama.

Rather, Jefferson was affirming the natural right of “all men” to be secure in their enjoyment of their “life, liberty and possessions.”

This is the very philosophy Hillary Clinton explicitly disavowed during one of the mindless presidential debates of 2007. Asked by a YouTubester to define “liberal,” Hillary revealed she knew full-well that the word originally denoted the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But she then settled on “progressive” as the appropriate label for her Fabian socialist plank.

Contra Clinton, as David N. Mayer explains in The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, colonial Americans were steeped in the writings of English Whigs—John Locke, Algernon Sidney, Paul Rapin, Thomas Gordon and others. The essence of this “pattern of ideas and attitudes,” almost completely lost today, was a view of government as an inherent threat to liberty and the necessity for eternal vigilance.

Jefferson, in particular, was adamant about the imperative “to be watchful of those in power,” a watchfulness another Whig philosopher explained thus: “Considering what sort of Creature Man is, it is scarce possible to put him under too many Restraints, when he is possessed of great Power.”

“As Jefferson saw it,” expounds Mayer, “the Whig, zealously guarding liberty, was suspicious of the use of government power,” and assumed “not only that government power was inherently dangerous to individual liberty but also that, as Jefferson put it, ‘the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.’”

For this reason, the philosophy of government that Jefferson articulated in the Declaration radically shifted sovereignty from parliament to the people.

But Jefferson‘s muse for the “American Mind” is even older.

The Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England‘s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated.

Philosophical purist that he was, moreover, Jefferson considered the Norman Conquest to have tainted this English tradition with the taint of feudalism. “To the Whig historian,” writes Mayer, “the whole of English constitutional history since the Conquest was the story of a perpetual claim kept up by the English nation for a restoration of Saxon laws and the ancient rights guaranteed by those laws.”

If Jefferson begrudged the malign influence of the Normans on the natural law he cherished, imagine how he’d view our contemporary cultural conquistadors from the South, whose customs preclude natural rights and natural reason!

Naturally, Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.

The settlers spilt their own blood “in acquiring lands for their settlement,” he wrote with pride in A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.” Thus they were “entitled to govern those lands and themselves.”

And, notwithstanding the claims of the multicultural noise machine, the Declaration was as mono-cultural as its author.

Let us, then, toast Thomas Jefferson—and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that sired and inspired him.

* Image courtesy of WND.

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What If The Media Were Moral?

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 18 Oct 2013 07:41:32 +0000

Media conservatives and liberals were agreed. The Republican brand, as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg put it, had been damaged by the debt-ceiling standoff.

Chuckie Krauthammer, another phony conservative, concurred. After badmouthing tea-party Republicans for attempting to leverage a partial government shut-down and debt-ceiling deadline to dilute ObamaCare, Krauthammer scolded “the media” for its biased coverage of the quixotic showdown.

Pot. Kettle. Krauthammer.

No sooner had the Senate voted, on Wednesday Oct. 16, to unconditionally reopen the spending spigot—seconded in short succession by Congress and the president—than an unabashed Dana Bash, chief congressional correspondent for CNN, cornered Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Her angle, like every other media mouthpiece in the country, was the futility of the fight Cruz had spearheaded:

As you well know, you have a lot of fellow Republicans really downright angry at you because, here we are, almost three weeks later, the strategy that you started out on to defund Obamacare as part of funding the government. They never thought it was going to work because the votes aren’t there. And here we are, reopening the government after a lot of bruising political warfare internally, and you got nothing for it.

More a leading suggestion than a journalistic question, Bash’s crude calculus—that outcomes, rather than principle, should dictate the political action pursued—was what Americans had been force-fed by her ilk over the past two weeks.

Throughout the so-called shutdown (unnoticed by hardworking Americans), Americans were exposed, day in and day out, to asphyxiating agitprop. The Taliban-like tea party caucus, they were told, was criminally negligent for refusing to allow the government to keep borrowing. Damned they were as “aging, white bigots” for daring to demand changes to a despised law, at the expense of the temporary furlough of 800,000 non-essential oink-sector workers, whose salaries are, on average, double that of the average wage in the country, and whose hefty healthcare and bankrupting retirement benefits the rest of the country can only dream of, but must pay for.

What Cruz had to say throughout the ordeal was not what Americans—who get most of their news from cable television and the news networks—got to hear. Repeated ad nauseam by these noisy, Democratic sleeper cells were the results of polls that reflected a media-manufactured consensus: “Republicans continue to get more blame than the Obama administration for Washington’s fiscal policy stalemate.”

Is there any wonder that infantile America mirrors its squandering government with respect to debt carried? “Like father, like son” goes a saying about the similarities between the behavior of parent and progeny. Like their government, Americans are debt-addled (the “fore horse for oppression and despotism,” forewarned Founding Father Thomas Jefferson). The total household debt in the U.S. stands at $13 trillion; student loans at $3.04 trillion.

If the media were moral, they’d have told Americans these truths.

If the media were moral, they’d have told Americans that the perennial debt crises are manufactured crises. That the U.S. government’s receipts are more than sufficient to cover its debt payments by a factor of approximately 10.

That the 14th Amendment (Section 4) of the U.S. Constitution prohibits a default on the country’s debt. That if the country were to default on the debt, it would be because President Barack Obama deliberately and maliciously chose to flout the Constitution (it’s the law of the land, unlike Obamacare), and not service the debt, so as to win a political battle.

If the media were moral, they’d tell America that it’s do or die. That capping the debt ceiling is perhaps the only way to compel a government that owes $17 trillion and carries “$70 trillion in off-balance-sheet liabilities” to make do with the loot it collects.

That the stock-market’s “confidence,” pursuant to lifting the cap on the debt, amounts to faith in confidence men; that soaring stocks in a debt-fueled, stagnant economy is a consequence of the confetti of funny-money raining down from the nation’s pantheon: the Federal Reserve Bank.

That non-stop monetary stimulus is the road to ruin—it results in a rise in prices, stocks included. Homes too. And that an increase in the price of an item is not the same as an appreciation in its value.

That the natural laws of economics dictate that Obamacare will increase both public and private debt.

That members of the media-monetary-military-congressional complex are immoral and have an allergy to the truth.

And that’s the honest to goodness truth.

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Independence And The Declaration Of Secession

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 07:31:37 +0000

“Tea party,” “patriot,” “Constitution,” and “Bill of Rights”: these keywords are the very stuff of the American Revolution, which took place during the last half of the 18th century. They are also some of the words that cued the “Infernal Revenue Service” (IRS) to target the philosophical descendants of the Revolutionaries, in 21st century America.

Had they been aware that in 2012 not all Americans are created equal, the targeted not-for-profit organizations, aiming to fly beneath the IRS radar, would have also avoided any references to “The Declaration of Independence,” whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate as Independence Day.

Ordinary Americans of a certain age are already in compliance with the anti-American program carried out by their government, Democratic or Republican. Having been conditioned by our country’s many Orwellian Ministries of Truth, they celebrate July 4th firecrackers, fire-sale prices and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. As this column once remarked, contemporary Americans are less likely to read The Declaration of Independence now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. As historian David Hackett Fischer recounted in “Liberty and Freedom,” printer John Dunlap had worked “through the night” to set the full text on “a handsome folio sheet.” And John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, urged that the “people be universally informed.”

And so the people were.

“From the beginning,” wrote James McClellan, “American Constitution-makers had the general support of their countrymen. The principles of government they espoused during the Revolution and implemented after the British surrender at Yorktown were widely shared in every town and village. It was on the basis of this remarkable consensus, this serene moment of creation, this fertile ground of American political experience, that the new Constitution was established.” (page 59)

The excerpt is from McClellan’s magisterial “Liberty, Order, And Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government,” published by Liberty Fund. Like many of this country’s greatest patriots, McClellan wrote from a farm in Virginia.

While Mark Levin, the radio man lauded by his Republican adherents as “The Great One,” has denounced the secessionists among us (check), McClellan (a real scholar) seconded the Declaration’s secessionist impetus. The Declaration’s first part, he argued, “offered a philosophical justification for secession, based on the theory that all men are entitled to basic rights, that the purpose of government is to protect those rights, and that the people have the right to abolish that government if it fails to fulfill its obligation.” (page 122) The provision of the Declaration of Independence that has aroused the greatest controversy is Thomas Jefferson’s statement “that all men are created equal. This was a poor choice of words,” admits McClellan, for “neither Jefferson nor any other members of the Continental Congress seriously believed that all people are equal.”

“Nor could Jefferson have possibly had in mind the “type of ‘égalité’ proclaimed by the French revolutionaries a decade later—that is, a radical leveling of society to a common stratum through government imposition of political, social, and economic equality.”

According to McClellan, the florid phrase “all men are created equal” meant only that “the American people, as a nation, were entitled to the same rights as Englishmen.” (page 130) This demand for equal rights is the main thrust of the Declaration of Independence. “Some forms of equality,” explained McClellan, “are clearly compatible with individual liberty, equality before the law or equal rights being the most obvious. … These forms of equality are generally consistent with the ideal of individual liberty because they may be attained without coercion.”

“Social and economic equality, on the other hand, finds no support in the Constitution or in the political tradition that grew out of the Declaration of Independence. … To reduce the entire American population to a single class of people, devoid of all social and economic distinctions, would have required massive and interminable coercion, resulting in a loss of individual liberty.”

Such “drastic measures” drove the Jacobin French Revolution. “They were never contemplated by those who wrote and approved the founding documents.” (page 136) With the Declaration of Independence, the colonists were advancing a constitutional argument whereby Americans would be “entitled to the rights of Englishmen”: “the right to trial by jury, the right to self-government, the right of taxation by consent, and the right against quartering troops in private household. Theirs was “a philosophical appeal resting on the claim of equal rights and the republican principles of government by consent.” (page 137)

The tenet of equality before the law served as a catalyst for the anti-slavery movement. Equally and justifiably is the preamble invoked “to support secession, the theory being that the States in 1861, as in 1776, had a fundamental or natural right to ‘change their form of government and institute a new [or no] government whenever necessary for their safety and happiness.”

Sadly—and as the existence of the IRS, an agency devoted to legalized thuggery attests—what remains of the sublime ideals “shared in every town and village” in early America is a deracinated, fragmented and demoralized people, managed to their detriment by a despotic State.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it “an expression of the American Mind.” Judging from their enemy lists, unceasing evil and dark schemes, IRS apparatchiks and their masters in government consider the Declaration an expression of a subversive American mind.

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Planet IRS

Ilana Mercer — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:06:45 +0000

“You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave!” Those are the chorus lyrics to “Hotel California,” the sublime rock classic by the Eagles.

Americans who try “running for the door”—in the evocative words of Glenn Frey, and the Dons Felder and Henley—soon discover that they “are all just prisoners here …”

Prisoners of Uncle Sam’s device.

If he can tolerate TSA assaults as he departs the country, an American who chooses to live and work overseas cannot escape the Internal Revenue Service. The United States is perhaps the only country “to tax its citizens on income earned while they’re living abroad.”

To loss of privacy and property, add the prospect of prison—and you get why, as Reuters has reported, droves of Americans are “renouncing their U.S. citizenship or handing in their Green Cards.”

On pain of criminal charges and “penalties of up to $100,000 or 50 percent of undeclared accounts, whichever is larger,” the expatriate must report his own bank accounts and all conjoint accounts—a spouse, a client, or business partners. The victims of this shakedown are residents who have foreign bank accounts (the Canadian equivalent of a small USA 401(k), in this scribe’s case), in addition to “an estimated 6.3 million U.S. citizens living abroad.”

The aims of their pursuers, the IRS, are control and compliance. The rogue agency’s source of revenue, in this context, is derived primarily from penalties for forgetfulness or faulty filing. All fear bankrupting fines, even imprisonment.

Due to the onerous burdens imposed by the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, foreign banks, as well as hedge and private equity funds are closing American accounts. Barack Obama’s legislative baby (signed on March 18, 2010) is driving Americans abroad into banking under the mattress.

Swiss bankers, for instance, can no longer provide Americans with certain financial services, considered perfectly legal in Switzerland; American financial imperialism has insinuated itself into the financial hub that is Switzerland. While the USA hasn’t yet bombed Basel, American Über-bureaucrats have prosecuted the hell out of financial establishments such as UBS AG and its American clients, for flouting US tax tyranny.

Writing in the April issue of Chronicles Magazine, Christopher Sandford, a naturalized American with investments abroad, describes his interactions with the Internal Revenue Service as akin to “dealing with a simultaneously incompetent and psychotically aggressive opponent. …a chameleonic opponent of real cunning, which consistently kept [Sandford] off balance by conducting itself as a relentless and finely calibrated machine at one moment, and a barely coherent rabble at the next.”

“Think the IRS can’t send you to prison?,” warns CBS’ Survivor winner Richard Hatch, in a timely television commercial. “The IRS sends people to prison and they’re not celebrities. If you owe the IRS $10,000 or more, call for your free tax consultation NOW. Listen, I went to prison for over four years, and you don’t want to,” Hatch tells potential victims.

Befitting an arm of a highly evolved, technocratic, militarized, Managerial State—a police state, by any other name—the IRS regularly criminalizes the actions of “non-compliant” victims, even though the alleged crime is, more often than not, unintentional. The “Rights of Englishmen,” bequeathed to the American Founders by their philosophical forbears, stipulated that there was to be no crime without intent.

Also unconstitutional is ex post facto (or retroactive) law. Yet the rogues at the IRS routinely change laws as they go, and criminalize “actions that were legal when committed.”

Thomas Jefferson’s bar has been met. We live under tyranny, for as our father forewarned, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

I happen to know what living without freedom is like. I left South Africa with the proceeds from the sale of my apartment stashed in the soles of my shoes. Had I been apprehended smuggling private property—my own—out of that country, I’d have faced criminal prosecution together with my husband; we both stood taller on that trip.

Little did I know that my adopted home, the USA, had adopted similar practices. An American emigrant risks being fondled by TSA brutes, fleeced via an “exit tax,” and his name placed on a “name and shame” list.

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A July Fourth Toast To Thomas Jefferson—And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate—has been mocked out of meaning.

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked “through the night” to set the full text on “a handsome folio sheet,” recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in Liberty And Freedom. And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the “people be universally informed.”

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it “an expression of the American Mind.” An examination of Jefferson’s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of a McCain, an Obama, or the collective mentality of the liberal establishment, “American” in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig—an American Whig whose roots were in the English Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Rather, Jefferson was affirming the natural right of “all men” to be secure in their enjoyment of their “life, liberty and possessions.”

Contra Clinton, as David N. Mayer explains in The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, colonial Americans were steeped in the writings of English Whigs—John Locke, Algernon Sidney, Paul Rapin, Thomas Gordon and others. The essence of this “pattern of ideas and attitudes,” almost completely lost today, was a view of government as an inherent threat to liberty and the necessity for eternal vigilance.

For this reason, the philosophy of government that Jefferson articulated in the Declaration radically shifted sovereignty from parliament to the people.

But Jefferson’s muse for the “American Mind” is even older.

The Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England’s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated.

The settlers spilt their own blood “in acquiring lands for their settlement,” he wrote with pride in A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.” Thus they were “entitled to govern those lands and themselves.”

And, notwithstanding the claims of the multicultural noise machine, the Declaration was as monocultural as its author.

Let us, then, toast Thomas Jefferson—and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that sired and inspired him.

©By ILANA MERCER
VDARE.COM
July 4, 2008

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Oprah’s Excellent Elitism

Ilana Mercer — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 08:00:00 +0000

I had a house in Africa, to paraphrase Karen von Blixen, author of the autobiographical “Out of Africa.” My first home was in a small town named Henley-on-Klip, in South Africa, where Oprah Winfrey chose to build a Leadership Academy for Girls.

When I saw Oprah turning that fertile, red soil to plant a tree on the 50-acre school grounds, I thought of my plot, just around the corner. Because of drought restrictions, I watered the half acre of acacia, golden cypress, jacaranda, willow and fruit trees we had planted with buckets. My two-year-old would toddle beside me, a miniature watering can in her tiny hand.

But that was a long time ago. From my vantage point in the US, I now looked on with pride at Oprah’s endeavor. How different it was from, say, Angelina Jolie’s. Jolie now regularly slams the West for not doing enough for the world’s poor. Jolie, who carts about a color-coordinated brood of illegitimate kids, has some nerve, of course. The West has given trillions in aid to the Third World! But with that pretentious tart, it’s all about emphasizing her providential purpose in the universe. To that end, she likes to discredit the rest.

There was none of that with Oprah. Her politics may be populist; but her deeds are patrician. Dare I suggest that there was something both Randian and Jeffersonian about this particular project?

As to the Randian grandness: The petty-minded at home and abroad carped about Oprah’s opulence. They wanted to know why she needed “this kind of environment for African girls, who were coming from huts.” Indeed, the project cost over $40 million and was intended, in Oprah’s words, to create “a beautiful environment that would inspire [the students].” She fussed over the architecture, she installed an amphitheater, fabulous library with fireplace, modern marble kitchen, an audio-video center, gym, tennis courts, and spa—the scale and the splendor scream “made in America.”

As for the Jeffersonian judiciousness: Thomas Jefferson insisted that all children, even the simple ones, must know “reading, writing, common arithmetic,” and history (not “social science” or “self-esteem”). He would have abhorred America’s sclerotic public schools for teaching none of the above. Still more would he have condemned our schools for the contempt they show the gifted. Jefferson believed that geniuses ought to be “raked from the rubbish.” American schools allot the gifted two pennies out of every 100 educational dollars and work hard to integrate them with the gimps.

Oprah can protest all she wants, but, like Jefferson, her actions bespeak a belief in “a natural aristocracy among men,” which Jefferson considered “the most precious gift of nature.” In an 1813 letter to John Adams, he described this natural aristocracy as distinguished by “virtue and talents,” and disavowed “an artificial aristocracy… without either virtue or talents.” Jefferson would have thus approved of the way Oprah separated the wheat from the chaff for her school, selecting each girl for her grades and grit. The 152 girls were chosen for qualities rare everywhere (and certainly among American school kids).

By now everyone has heard what Oprah had to say about kids in American inner-city schools: “The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there. If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms, so they can go to school.”

And it’s not just the inner-city children. Despite being the best funded school system in the world, American public schools graduate the thickest kids in the developed world. Paradoxically, while our high-school students score near the bottom in international competitions, when asked to rate themselves, they consistently give themselves top marks. But then so do their parents and teachers. Thanks to constant, unwarranted worship, and no moral or rigorous intellectual instruction, American schools are full of lame and lazy megalomaniacs.

By contrast, the lasses Oprah chose for her Academy come from poverty unimaginable in the US. Before Oprah, Mbali Meyers, for example, lived in a one-room shack with no running water or electricity and shared a water tap and outhouse with 30 neighbors. The family (which is typically matriarchal or fatherless) would often go to bed hungry. “At night,” reports CNN’s Jeff Koinange, “Mbali burns the midnight oil by candlelight, doing her homework on her knees. There’s no room here for luxuries like chairs.” Yet Mbali has consistently been at the top of her class.

Many of Oprah’s girls were also raped. South Africa has the most rapes per capita (as well as murders and assaults). African young men there consider rape a form of recreation. They even have a name for gang rape: “jackrolling.” Some of the girls are AIDS orphans. Yet despite the trammels of despair, they’ve retained a child-like innocence and sweetness, qualities unusual among jaded distaff America. One young girl said she felt like crying—but crying of happiness. The other said this was “more than a dream come true. It’s like a fairy tale.”

And the fairy godmother herself looked grand in pink taffeta. Never once did Oprah preach about how the West could cure poverty if governments gave more (one of Jolie’s idiot utterances). She simply “gave more.”

On that day, Oprah exemplified the qualities of a great American philanthropist and entrepreneur.

©2007 Ilana Mercer
   WorldNetDaily.com, Ottawa Citizen (January 26)
   & East Valley Tribune (January 22)
   January

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THOMAS JEFFERSON VS. THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 07:00:00 +0000

What would he say about arrivals from Wahhabi-worshiping wastelands whose customs not only preclude “natural right and natural reason,” but include killing their hosts? That would have appalled Jefferson, and again, not because of his limitations, but because of ours; because of how low we have sunk ~ilana

Not allowing the clouds to cap one’s vision is an admirable quality, but allowing them to cloud reality is hardly praiseworthy. The principled positions of the Libertarian Party should have the potential to unite America in a common political purpose. Not the current Libertarian Party, however. Not after nominating a presidential candidate who refuses to see the perils of free, unfettered immigration.

For the first time in an eternity, libertarians can begin to make political inroads. The libertarian opposition to unprovoked wars of aggression appeals to a sizeable anti-war constituency, left and right, for which the invasion of Iraq was a watershed event.

The LP’s stellar stands on civil liberties, and privacy, and its firm opposition to the war on drugs – these are bound to attract yet more liberals and some conservatives who rightly believe that government has no place in the nation’s medicine cabinets, snuff boxes, or hovering over their deathbeds.

The Patriot Act, tariffs, First Amendment infringements, the unparalleled expansion of Medicare entitlements, and the scrofulous spending are making it hard for neoconservatives to continue to pretend that Emperor George is clothed.

Ideologically, Kerry is also naked.

When Howard Dean primal screamed his way out of the race, left-of-center Democrats were left homeless. John Kerry will not capture these disaffected voters. The LP has the potential to so do. Considering its candidate’s strong commitment to the actual defense of America (as opposed to gratuitous foreign offensives), the LP might even manage to woo neoconservatively inclined Democrats.

Why, the sky could be the limit. The chaos neoconservatives leave in their wake may just prime Americans for an awakening.

The canonical William F. Buckley recently apostatized over the invasion of Iraq, prompting other Big Government conservatives (or neoconservatives) to do a double take: “If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.” Buckley also confessed to being enormously bothered by the growth of government under Bush.

With a vital program that promises to beat back government and reinvigorate civil society, the LP is well positioned to return America to the vision of the founders: a free society founded on individual rights and responsibilities.

Yet hardly any of my readers will cast a vote for this party.

As traditional Taft Republicans, they are the natural allies of libertarians. But like most Americans, left and right, they desire greatly reduced legal immigration and a swift end to the illegal influx. What an opportunity for the LP to fill the void and become the only party to respect the people’s leave-me-alone (negative) rights.

On immigration, however, the LP is no better, and perhaps much worse, than the Democrats and the Republicans. “Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them,” I wrote, “are two sides of the same neoconservative coin.” A Libertarian government may never invade, but it’ll definitely invite an invasion.

Against such an eventuality Thomas Jefferson famously cautioned in “Notes on Virginia< /st1:place>” (Q.VIII, 1782. ME 2:118):

[Is] rapid population [growth] by as great importations of foreigners as possible … founded in good policy? … They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.

These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their number, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass … If they come of themselves, they are entitled to all the rights of citizenship: but I doubt the expediency of inviting them by extraordinary encouragements …

Alas, the LP has selectively picked and chosen from the richly textured words of Jefferson, and turned this classical liberal into their Emma Lazarus.” But somehow, our state-planned, multicultural, egalitarian quota system, which divides visas between nations with an emphasis on mass importation of people from the Third World – the short and sweet of our immigration system – didn’t enter Jefferson’s consciousness.

And not because his was not an extremely advanced consciousness.

Writing of immigration to George Flower in 1817, Jefferson worried about “consecrat[ing] a sanctuary for those whom the misrule of Europe [my emphasis] may compel to seek happiness in other climes.” And to J. Lithgow in 1805, “A first question is, whether it is desirable for us to receive at present the dissolute and demoralized handicraftsmen of the old cities of Europe [my emphasis].” Jefferson feared that immigrants under “the maxims of absolute monarchies” – again, he was not talking about the monarchies of Buganda or Ethiopia – may not acclimatize to “the freest principles of the English constitution.”

What would he say about arrivals from Wahhabi-worshiping wastelands whose customs not only preclude “natural right and natural reason,” but include killing their hosts? That would have appalled Jefferson, and again, not because of his limitations, but because of ours; because of how low we have sunk.

The greatest-ever American (no, it’s not Tamar Jacoby) would not have “lower[ed] the requirements for coming to the U.S.,” as the LP proposes, but would have raised them to impossible heights. And most Americans share his standards.

In order to complete the construction of a serious alternative to the current “Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber” electoral alternatives, the Libertarian Party must heed Jefferson on immigration and scatter the clouds of unreason.

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JUDGE MOORE AND THE GODLESS 14TH AMENDMENT

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore paid for and placed a granite monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments in the Alabama judicial building, where he presides. This was two years ago. Predictably, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) could not tolerate the sight of a moral code displayed on taxpayer-funded property. Together with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the ACLU alleged the justice had violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

A district judge by the name of Myron Thompson then ordered the removal of the Decalogue. Moore appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for an emergency stay. When this was denied, a nine-member state tribunal suspended him with pay. If the monument is not removed, the plaintiffs want Moore held in contempt and fines levied against the state.

First Amendment jurisprudence has tended to see the injunction against the establishment of a state religion as an injunction against the expression of faith—especially discriminating against the founding Judeo-Christian faith—in taxpayer-supported spheres. The end result has been the expulsion of religion from the public square and the suppression therein of freedom of religion.

Thomas Jefferson was prolific on the topic of religious freedom—the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was a crowning achievement for which he wished to be remembered, along with the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia.

With “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the exercise thereof,” Jefferson intended, according to David N. Meyer, author of Jefferson’s Constitutional Thought, to guarantee both “an absolute free exercise of religion and an absolute prohibition of an establishment of religion.”

It’s difficult to see how the display of the Decalogue constitutes an establishment of a state religion or why Moore should be forbidden to so express his faith. The Ten Commandments are a civilizing moral code. Fine, the first few Commandments, among which are Commandments that exhort against idolatry and pantheism, do pertain to ethical monotheism. But other than those, why would anyone (bar the ACLU) object to “thou shall not kill,” or to “thou shall not commit adultery, steal, or covet?” The Ten Commandments can hardly be perceived as an instrument for state proselytization.

However obvious, this is not the soul of the subject in the case of Justice Moore.

Back to Jefferson: “I consider the government of the U.S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercise,” Jefferson expatiated. He then gets to the essence of the issue: “This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment, or free exercise of religion but also from the Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states [or to the people] the powers not delegated to the U.S.”

That was true until the ratification of the 14th Amendment!

Prior to that, the federal government had no authority to enforce the Bill of Rights in the states, religious freedoms included. The Bill of Rights, very plainly, did not grant the federal government any powers, but was intended to place limits on the federal government’s actions. Ratified illegally after the War Between the States, the 14th Amendment overrode, to all intents and purposes, the doctrine of states’ rights, to which Jefferson looked for the preservation of freedoms.

The particular portion of the miscellany that is the 14th states: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The gargantuan grant of power to the federal government is thus sealed: “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

In American federalism, the rights of the individual are secured through the strict limits imposed on the power of the central government by a Bill of Rights and the division of authority between autonomous states and a federal government. As Frank Chodorov wrote, states’ rights are “an essential Americanism. The Founding Fathers and the opponents of the Constitution agreed on the principle of divided authority as a safeguard to the rights of the individual.”

If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect the individual from government, the 14th, in effect, defeated that purpose. What it did was to put the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.

Naturally, states can just as well violate individual rights. But, as Chodorov highlighted, there is no monopoly power behind a state’s action. If a state wants to outlaw alcohol, then one can move to a state that doesn’t. (That’s one way for state legislators to ensure that their states will be as densely populated as the moon.) If a state wants to establish a religion, and its own constitution doesn’t prohibit this, one can move to a state with a different constitution. Competition in government puts the brakes on folly and abuse and preserves freedom.

The 14th Amendment violated this balance, or as Felix Morley observed in Freedom and Federalism, it nullified “the original purpose of the Bill of Rights, by vesting its enforcement in the national rather than in the state governments.” This just about renders asunder the Ninth and 10th amendments—what powers do the states retain if the federal government has gobbled them all up?

When the federal government became the arbiter of individual rights—freedom of religion included—the doctrine of limitation of powers was badly damaged, if not destroyed. In the real world, as opposed to the wasteland of pure theory, government—especially centralized government—is the natural enemy of natural rights. Putting the central government in exclusive charge of protecting natural rights is the height of folly.

Judge Moore rightly proclaimed his innocence in the Wall Street Journal. “The First Amendment says that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ It does not take a constitutional scholar to recognize that I am not Congress, and no law has been passed,” he protests.

However, when the Justice proclaims, “The Ninth Amendment secured our right as a people. The 10th guaranteed our right as a sovereign state,” he is neglecting that along came the 14th and did away with all that.

Justice Roy Moore has more on his hands than he bargained for, although his passions are well suited to begin the necessary groundswell that’ll see the repeal of the 14th Amendment.

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In Canada Only the Mediocre Survive

Ilana Mercer — Mon, 26 Mar 2001 00:00:00 +0000

In assessing the measure of Mr. Preston Manning, founder of the once right wing Canadian Alliance Party, most seem agreed that his greatest gift to Canadian politics is in persuading the West to stay in Confederation. I would hesitate to tarnish Mr. Manning, whose political attrition culminated when he announced his intention to quit his House of Commons seat by the year’s end, with sundering nascent Western separatism. If indeed Mr. Manning marginalized even further the peaceful right to a political divorce—then this is no achievement.

With his cri de coeur, “The West Wants In,” Mr. Manning is said to have bolstered the cause of national unity. Like that other dubious abstraction, “the public good,” national unity has become a totalitarian term, inimical to freedom. The human condition is simply too genuinely diverse to be able to unite nationally. For some, national unity is destined to be a coerced state of being: As soon as the pathology of an overreaching federal government starts to fuel that regional fever of freedom, governments let this ideological cobra out of its sack so that it can mesmerize citizens into submission. As economist Murray N. Rothbard pointed out, genuine nationality is not to be equated with state-decreed unity or with the modern nation-state. The unity we have in Canada is the provenance of the proto-centrist Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his minions. With mounting Western, and to a lesser degree Quebecker, discontent, Canada can hardly be termed a true federation, since she is no longer made up of voluntary partners that retain sovereignty over their own affairs. The question, of course, is whether an Administration rooted in the PM’s hegemony is what unity is all about. And if so, what kind of unity is achieved through the threat of “tough love” and the indenturing of some provinces to others?

More charitably, I would venture that in the unlikely event that Preston Manning had led a secessionist movement, it may have succeeded. For the most, the point-persons for Western secession speak a utilitarian language. From where they are perched, it all seems to boil down to the costs versus the benefits of being in Canada. With the West paying many times over for the privilege of Confederation, proponents of autonomy correctly pronounce the balance sheet to be badly skewed.

Still, secession has not really been defended as the mainstay of the liberties of a sub-national region. No doubt, economics undergirds secessionist sentiments; the fruits of Western foresight and initiative (read Alberta) are siphoned off by the center and funneled to PM Jean Chretien’s patronage playgrounds. The unending pelf perpetrated by the Canadian Liberal government is indeed reason enough for the West to leave. But unless secession redux can be achieved, to wit, a renewed historical and philosophical understanding of the importance of the right to secede, secession is doomed to be no more than an eddying view to Jean Chretien’s omnipotent centrism. Secession must emerge as a higher-not subordinate-principle. It isn’t, because its proponents neglect the soul of secession.

In Secession, State & Liberty, Mises Institute scholar David Gordon properly captures this essence. “Secession,” writes Gordon, “arises from individual rights”. The right to withdraw is defendable on the basis of individual—not group—rights. As I see it, secession is the political complement of the right of free association.

The American Founding Fathers understood this. Thomas Jefferson viewed extreme decentralization as the bulwark of the liberty and rights of man. Consequently, the U.S. was created as a pact between sovereign states with which the ultimate power lay. Sadly, the U.S. has progressed from a decentralized republic into a highly consolidated one. In the US, to speak of the Rights of the States, much less of secession gets you consigned to the lunatic fringe.

Canada, on the other hand, was born of a highly centralized regime, and has always cleaved to an expansionist national policy. Yet, paradoxically, it is Canada in recent years that has outstripped the U.S. in spurring powerful regional movements and in reviving secession as an arduous but valid political route.

Preston Manning is an idealist. He staked out unprecedented positions in the Canadian polity on the wrongs of deficit spending and on the need to return to Canadians the product of their labor in the form of tax cuts. He courageously denounced the zero-sum-game of extant identity politics, where benefits to some groups accrue at the expense to others. Would that Mr. Manning had been less slavish about Canadian federalism, he might have led a mighty secessionist movement. More than any other Canadian politician, Manning has the cerebral agility to have articulated the philosophy of secession and liberty. Instead, what did his pro-federalist plea get him and us? Through no fault of his own, Mr. Manning failed to quell the boorish vilification of Westerners by Eastern buffoons. In fact, for some reason, he incited the Liberal lickspittle media to new heights of Western libel. For wanting to be free men and women, we are repeatedly depicted as unruly, treasonous, and racist mouth-breathers.

Would Mr. Manning have ever achieved the real goal of decentralizing the Canadian nation-state? Could he have inched the Canadian mind-set any closer to holding a purely functional view of government, where it secures individual rights and no more? I doubt it very much. Outlining the broadest of distinctions, economist. Walter Block wrote in the Journal of Markets & Morality: “Libertarians favor freedom in both economic and social spheres, (while conservatives agree with only the former position and liberals with only the latter.” In short, “Right wingers advocate liberty in commercial but not personal affairs, while left wingers invert this stance, defending freedom in the bedroom but not in the boardroom.”

Preston Manning, of course, was a conservative through and through.

This much can be said, however, about the Canadian national psyche: Canadians are in the habit of routinely expunging the best and brightest from their midst. To sustain its system of forced egalitarianism, this nation is invested in banality (the fatuous, yet prized prattle of a Naomi Klein, a John Ralston Saul or a Mark Kingwell come to mind; these Canadian have also been embraced by American leftist proponents of the Culture of the Commons). The mediocre give Canadians consolation. And the mediocre serve national unity like no other: they reduce cognitive dissonance and bring about that much coveted Canadian deadpan homogeneity. Indeed, mediocrity in Canada is essential to survival. Mr. Manning was a populist, and a man of intellect and integrity. He was not mediocre which is why Canadians disliked him so.

Mr. Manning might have further distinguished himself had he rejected the coercive concept of national unity and realized that free people live in the kind of communities where the Beltway or Ottawa cannot make a difference in their lives.

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