Commentary > Op-eds
It’s Time To Get Back To Our Founders’ Principles
By HERB DENENBERG, For The Bulletin
We’re forgetting the basic principles of the Founders of America. That is due, in part, to the failure of secondary education, which doesn’t teach the unique history and role of the U.S. and due to turning colleges and universities into centers of anti-Americanism, anti-capitalist, cultural relativism, and multiculturalism. This has now reached crisis proportions with a president who hates America, and has a White House full of Marxists, socialists, communists, Maoists and radicals. Yes, the inmates and lunatics seem to be running the asylum.
The time has come for an all out campaign to stop Barack Obama’s pursuit of the destruction of America and to get back to the basic principles of our Founders. They are principles produced from the Bible and Aristotle onto John Locke and Montesquieu passed on to and adopted by the Founders themselves. One of the classic catalogues and elaborations of those principles can be found in a book, which every American should read. Its author is W. Cleon Skousen and it is entitled The Five Thousand Year Leap: 28 Great Ideas That Changed The World. Those 28 great ideas are the principles of our Founders enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and responsible for making America the greatest, the most humanitarian, the most generous nation in the history of the world, truly the golden city on a hill, that is now the last best hope for mankind.
In the preface of this book, Skousen writes, “As I studied Constitutional law, there was always a nagging curiosity as to why someone had not taken the time and trouble to catalogue the ingredients of the Founding Fathers’ phenomenal success formula so it would be less complex and easier to digest. It seemed incredible that these gems of political sagacity had to be dug out of obscurity by each individual doing it piecemeal and never really knowing for certain that the whole puzzle had been completely assembled.”
This book does exactly that and provides powerful understanding of the elements that make America great. The book lines these gems of the Founders into a bejeweled array of America’s principles. It is, perhaps, the best formulation and elaboration of those elements. One of the most striking aspects of those elements is that they are almost always the exact opposite of Obamaism. If you want to understand the principles of the Founders and what makes America great, read this book. Another way to get to the Founders’ phenomenal success story is to take the very opposite of the principles of Mr. Obama and of the Democratic leadership. Here is a discussion of some of the 28 basic principles of the Founders, as explained by Skousen and, often, in the Founders’ own words.
Principle: Avoiding The Burden Of Debt
Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Think what you do when you run in debt; you give to another the power over your liberty.” Yes, as Skousen writes, “The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjugation by conquest.”
Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress have already turned us into a beggar nation. That’s why Mr. Obama went to China and, instead of talking about things like human rights and fair international trade, he had to grovel before the Chinese. This pathetic excuse for a leader seems to be spending his time bowing to the likes of the King of Saudi Arabia and the Emperor of Japan and bootlicking our enemies while slamming our friends and allies. Most notably Mr. Obama has already thrown the United Kingdom and Israel under the bus. This is explained, in part, by his American-hating perspective, but also by his irresponsible, reckless, unsustainable spending which has weakened America and now threatens to destroy the dollar, the economy, and American economic strength necessary for national defense and a sound foreign policy.
The Founders knew borrowing may be necessary in an emergency, but cautioned to get out of debt as soon as possible and to recognize the dangers of a burdensome national debt. Thomas Jefferson put it bluntly: “I, however, place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and pubic debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.”
George Washington, at the very beginning of America, warned against the national debt and emphasized the need to pay it off as soon as possible: “No pecuniary consideration is more urgent than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt; on none can delay be more injurious, or an economy of time more valuable.”
Of course, Mr. Obama’s reckless expansion of debt will make it impossible to pay off the debt anytime in the near future. In fact, the debt is so massive that there is a serious question of whether it can ever be paid off. If that’s not bad enough, in an almost insane fashion, Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress are just warming up in their campaign to increase the debt, accelerate spending, and destroy the economy. They’ve already put us in a hopeless hole and now comes more trillion dollar spending and debt with Obamacare, a second stimulus bill, cap and trade, and every crazy liberal tax and spend program that can be conceived. So, if you want sane policy and if you want the principles of the Founders, just watch what Mr. Obama wants to do…and do the opposite. Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress have buried the U.S. in debt in ten months. What will be left after 48 months of this mad rampage against America?
Principle: Equal Rights, Not Equal Things
Skousen writes, “The proper role of government is to protect equal rights, not provide equal things.” The Founders, Skousen explains, recognized that you cannot delegate to government the powers to do anything except that “which they have the lawful right to do themselves.” One citizen cannot simply take from his neighbor. So, the power to take from one to give to another is not one that can be properly delegated to government. Mr. Obama’s notion to “spread the wealth around,” and his “redistributionist” approach are simply unconstitutional and contrary to the basic principles of our Founders. This approach has also failed wherever tried. As Margaret Thatcher pointed out, socialism collapses when the socialists run out of other people’s money to give away.
Samuel Adams explained this principle as follows: “The utopian schemes of leveling [redistribution of the wealth] and a community of goods [centralized ownership of the means of production and distribution], are as visionary and practicable as those which vest all property in the crown. [These items] are arbitrary, despotic and, in our government, unconstitutional.
Mr. Obama’s view of the constitution is unconstitutional. Before his election as president, he told a radio audience that the trouble with the civil rights movement is that it did not get into redistribution. Mr. Obama, the socialist and leftist, believes in redistribution. One aspect of this is his reflexive tendency to raise taxes and to do so on the rich. His commitment to soaking the rich and redistributing the wealth is so strong and irrational that he favored raising the capital gain tax in the interest of fairness, even knowing it would actually cut rather than raise tax revenue.
Principle: Peace Through Strength
George Washington stated this principle in one short sentence: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” And he elaborated thus: “There is a rank due to the United States among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.”
Skousen also explains that our ability to defend ourselves depends on the strength of our economy and the level of our public morality: “Thus, the Founders passed on to their posterity a policy of peace through strength. They were peace loving, but not pacifists. They called for a rugged kind of strength bolted to a broad base. They saw the foundation for their security in a bustling, prosperous economy with a high standard of public morality; and they saw the necessity for a level of preparedness which discouraged attack from potential enemies by creating a rate of risk so high that the waging of war against this nation would be an obviously unprofitable undertaking.”
Mr. Obama, of course, takes a course of weakness rather than strength. After the Koreans fired a missile that threatened Japan, he cuts funds for our missile defense program. He tries to appease the Russians by betraying the Poles and Czechs by going back on his promise to put missile defense systems in their counties. Mr. Obama betrays and sells-out our friends and allies, while he appeases and bootlicks our enemies. Mr. Obama pushes spending on every whacky, expensive, wasteful liberal program, but wants to cut back on defense.
Here are some of the other 28 principles:
• The virtues of the natural law.
• A virtuous and moral people.
• Virtuous and moral leaders.
• The role of religion.
• The role of the Creator.
• All men are created equal.
• Man’s unalienable rights.
• The role of revealed law.
Herb Denenberg can be reached at advocate@thebulletin.us
The time has come for an all out campaign to stop Barack Obama’s pursuit of the destruction of America and to get back to the basic principles of our Founders. They are principles produced from the Bible and Aristotle onto John Locke and Montesquieu passed on to and adopted by the Founders themselves. One of the classic catalogues and elaborations of those principles can be found in a book, which every American should read. Its author is W. Cleon Skousen and it is entitled The Five Thousand Year Leap: 28 Great Ideas That Changed The World. Those 28 great ideas are the principles of our Founders enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and responsible for making America the greatest, the most humanitarian, the most generous nation in the history of the world, truly the golden city on a hill, that is now the last best hope for mankind.
In the preface of this book, Skousen writes, “As I studied Constitutional law, there was always a nagging curiosity as to why someone had not taken the time and trouble to catalogue the ingredients of the Founding Fathers’ phenomenal success formula so it would be less complex and easier to digest. It seemed incredible that these gems of political sagacity had to be dug out of obscurity by each individual doing it piecemeal and never really knowing for certain that the whole puzzle had been completely assembled.”
This book does exactly that and provides powerful understanding of the elements that make America great. The book lines these gems of the Founders into a bejeweled array of America’s principles. It is, perhaps, the best formulation and elaboration of those elements. One of the most striking aspects of those elements is that they are almost always the exact opposite of Obamaism. If you want to understand the principles of the Founders and what makes America great, read this book. Another way to get to the Founders’ phenomenal success story is to take the very opposite of the principles of Mr. Obama and of the Democratic leadership. Here is a discussion of some of the 28 basic principles of the Founders, as explained by Skousen and, often, in the Founders’ own words.
Principle: Avoiding The Burden Of Debt
Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Think what you do when you run in debt; you give to another the power over your liberty.” Yes, as Skousen writes, “The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjugation by conquest.”
Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress have already turned us into a beggar nation. That’s why Mr. Obama went to China and, instead of talking about things like human rights and fair international trade, he had to grovel before the Chinese. This pathetic excuse for a leader seems to be spending his time bowing to the likes of the King of Saudi Arabia and the Emperor of Japan and bootlicking our enemies while slamming our friends and allies. Most notably Mr. Obama has already thrown the United Kingdom and Israel under the bus. This is explained, in part, by his American-hating perspective, but also by his irresponsible, reckless, unsustainable spending which has weakened America and now threatens to destroy the dollar, the economy, and American economic strength necessary for national defense and a sound foreign policy.
The Founders knew borrowing may be necessary in an emergency, but cautioned to get out of debt as soon as possible and to recognize the dangers of a burdensome national debt. Thomas Jefferson put it bluntly: “I, however, place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and pubic debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.”
George Washington, at the very beginning of America, warned against the national debt and emphasized the need to pay it off as soon as possible: “No pecuniary consideration is more urgent than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt; on none can delay be more injurious, or an economy of time more valuable.”
Of course, Mr. Obama’s reckless expansion of debt will make it impossible to pay off the debt anytime in the near future. In fact, the debt is so massive that there is a serious question of whether it can ever be paid off. If that’s not bad enough, in an almost insane fashion, Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress are just warming up in their campaign to increase the debt, accelerate spending, and destroy the economy. They’ve already put us in a hopeless hole and now comes more trillion dollar spending and debt with Obamacare, a second stimulus bill, cap and trade, and every crazy liberal tax and spend program that can be conceived. So, if you want sane policy and if you want the principles of the Founders, just watch what Mr. Obama wants to do…and do the opposite. Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress have buried the U.S. in debt in ten months. What will be left after 48 months of this mad rampage against America?
Principle: Equal Rights, Not Equal Things
Skousen writes, “The proper role of government is to protect equal rights, not provide equal things.” The Founders, Skousen explains, recognized that you cannot delegate to government the powers to do anything except that “which they have the lawful right to do themselves.” One citizen cannot simply take from his neighbor. So, the power to take from one to give to another is not one that can be properly delegated to government. Mr. Obama’s notion to “spread the wealth around,” and his “redistributionist” approach are simply unconstitutional and contrary to the basic principles of our Founders. This approach has also failed wherever tried. As Margaret Thatcher pointed out, socialism collapses when the socialists run out of other people’s money to give away.
Samuel Adams explained this principle as follows: “The utopian schemes of leveling [redistribution of the wealth] and a community of goods [centralized ownership of the means of production and distribution], are as visionary and practicable as those which vest all property in the crown. [These items] are arbitrary, despotic and, in our government, unconstitutional.
Mr. Obama’s view of the constitution is unconstitutional. Before his election as president, he told a radio audience that the trouble with the civil rights movement is that it did not get into redistribution. Mr. Obama, the socialist and leftist, believes in redistribution. One aspect of this is his reflexive tendency to raise taxes and to do so on the rich. His commitment to soaking the rich and redistributing the wealth is so strong and irrational that he favored raising the capital gain tax in the interest of fairness, even knowing it would actually cut rather than raise tax revenue.
Principle: Peace Through Strength
George Washington stated this principle in one short sentence: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” And he elaborated thus: “There is a rank due to the United States among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.”
Skousen also explains that our ability to defend ourselves depends on the strength of our economy and the level of our public morality: “Thus, the Founders passed on to their posterity a policy of peace through strength. They were peace loving, but not pacifists. They called for a rugged kind of strength bolted to a broad base. They saw the foundation for their security in a bustling, prosperous economy with a high standard of public morality; and they saw the necessity for a level of preparedness which discouraged attack from potential enemies by creating a rate of risk so high that the waging of war against this nation would be an obviously unprofitable undertaking.”
Mr. Obama, of course, takes a course of weakness rather than strength. After the Koreans fired a missile that threatened Japan, he cuts funds for our missile defense program. He tries to appease the Russians by betraying the Poles and Czechs by going back on his promise to put missile defense systems in their counties. Mr. Obama betrays and sells-out our friends and allies, while he appeases and bootlicks our enemies. Mr. Obama pushes spending on every whacky, expensive, wasteful liberal program, but wants to cut back on defense.
Here are some of the other 28 principles:
• The virtues of the natural law.
• A virtuous and moral people.
• Virtuous and moral leaders.
• The role of religion.
• The role of the Creator.
• All men are created equal.
• Man’s unalienable rights.
• The role of revealed law.
Herb Denenberg can be reached at advocate@thebulletin.us
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