(Wallbuilders) Radio Show link

"Useful library of all things patriotic."

Not only is the wallbuilders.com site a resource for "patriotic" materials, but for original documents from our nation's history. The collection of original writings assembled by David Barton at Wallbuilders and is a superb resource.

Another such collection can be found at the Liberty Fund Library which can equip TEA Partiers and all freedom fighters with ideas and quotations for use in intelligent debate on today's critical issues of government power vs. liberty.

Featured on the Liberty Library page today is a quotation from William Graham Sumner on "State Interference" in 1887:

"Consequently, when the old-fashioned theories of State interference are applied to the new democratic State, they turn out to be simply a device for setting separate interests in a struggle against each other inside the society. It is plain on the face of all the great questions which are offered to us as political questions to-day, that they are simply struggles of interests for larger shares of the product of industry. One mode of dealing with this distribution would be to leave it to free contract under the play of natural laws. If we do not do this, and if the State interferes with the distribution, how can we stop short of the mediaæval plan of reiterated and endless interference, with constant diminution of the total product to be divided?

"We have seen above what the tyranny was in the decay of the Roman Empire, when each was in servitude to all; but there is one form of that tyranny which may be still worse. That tyranny will’be realized when the same system of servitudes is established in a democratic state; when a man’s neighbors are his masters; when the “ethical power of public opinion” bears down upon him at all hours and as to all matters; when his place is assigned to him and he is held in it, not by an emperor or his satellites, who cannot be everywhere all the time, but by the other members of the “village community” who can.

"So long as the struggle for individual liberty took the form of a demand that the king or the privileged classes should take their hands off, it was popular and was believed to carry with it the cause of justice and civilization. Now that the governmental machine is brought within everyone’s reach, the seduction of power is just as masterful over a democratic faction as ever it was over king or barons. No governing organ has yet abstained from any function because it acknowledged itself ignorant or incompetent. The new powers in the State show no disposition to do it. Nevertheless, the activity of the State, under the new democratic system, shows itself every year more at the mercy of clamorous factions, and legislators find themselves constantly under greater pressure to act, not by their deliberate judgment of what is expedient, but in such a way as to quell clamor, although against their judgment of public interests. It is rapidly becoming the chief art of the legislator to devise measures which shall sound as if they satisfied clamor while they only cheat it."Where are the wise today who can sum up so concisely what this Administration and the Democrats and RINO's in Congress are doing to American liberty?

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