Some student of history you are. My grandparents were "serfs" here, if they were lucky.
Posted on 01/25/2005 4:37:42 PM PST by Cornpone
Dear Freepers,
I'm getting old and perhaps a little wacky but as I look back over my life I continue to try and understand how my country hasn't quite turned out the way my mother and father brought me up to believe it should be and what it was I was always raised to defend. So I've started making a list of those things that just seem to represent a betrayal of what I always thought America is about...freedom. Its a short list, I'm still working on it and I know many, if not most, will not agree with everything on it. But I'm sure everyone has something to add to it...like the state of medical care in this country which I haven't even begun to think about. Anyway, they are simple things that individually don't amount to much. But, taken together they represent a fundamental change in our culture if you think about it. Please help me add to this list. I don't know what I will do with it. Perhaps I'll just go nail it on the doors of Congress..not likely. I'd rather nail it on the doors of the White House except we can't really go there anymore...another freedom lost.
• Mandatory motorcycle helmet laws
• Mandatory automobile seatbelt laws
• Mandatory boating lifejacket laws
• Increasing erosion of property rights
• Increasing regulation of alcohol consumption, tobacco use and firearms possession
• Virtual elimination of the right to self defense
• Denial of the right to carry a weapon for self defense
• Hate crime laws that ridiculously imply that the murder of one human being is more heinous than the murder of another based on some politically motivated criteria
• Encroachment on the constitutional right to assembly
• Increasing attempts to limit our constitutional right to free speech through hate speech laws that seek to dampen dissident opinions
• Increasing restrictions on demonstrations of personal faith with a bias against Christians
• Increasing restrictions on hunting
• Increasing restrictions on fishing
• Increasing restrictions on the traditional use of fireworks
• Increasing restrictions on traditional methods of outdoor cooking
• Increasing restrictions on water rights and usage
• Increasing government incursion and attempts to regulate the possession of domestic animals which in all cases don’t happen to be ‘pets’
• Unfair taxation to fund social practices abhorrent to most Americans
• Government advocacy of socially deviant lifestyles
• Government attempts to redefine millennia-old family relationships and bonds, i.e., gay marriage
• Affirmative action laws and policies that unjustly punish and deny opportunity to current generations based on the shortcomings of generations long past
• Ridiculous product liability judgments that seek to limit access and deny choice through judicial activism rather than legislative debate
Add your thoughts to the list please.
God Bless our Forefathers and God Bless You
What road was that? The road we are on now is leading us to serfdom.
Did you actually mean "Increased" drinking age?
We started losing our freedoms when we started demanding the government take care of everyone.
Some student of history you are. My grandparents were "serfs" here, if they were lucky.
Mandatory access to sidewalks for wheelchairs.
Laws that require you to separate your trash.
Laws that prohibit you from asking some questions of interviewees.
Laws that require schools to have a girls team for every boys team in a sport.
Union laws backed up by force of government that prohibit a math teacher from coming in early to work with her students.
Random stops of vehicles without a search warrant to look for drunks.
The law that enables police to enter, search and leave your house without you knowing it.
Just a few to start.
How many Black slaves could buy, own, and bear guns in 1792?
Repealing alcohol Prohibition is leading to serfdom?! Legalizing gold ownership in the 1970's is leading us back to serfdom?
Abolishing sugar and gasoline rationing is leading us back to serfdom? Banishing Jim Crow laws is leading back to serfdom?
Repealing wage and price controls is leading us back to serfdom? Eliminating the 55 mile per hour national speed limit is leading us back to serfdom?
Sunsetting the Assault Weapons Ban is leading us back to serfdom?! Killing the federal ban against commercial airline pilots packing heat is leading us back to serfdom?!
Legalizing the ability of citizens to use the Internet for profit is leading us back to serfdom?! Giving women the right to vote is leading us back to serfdom?!
It's no wonder that you 3rd Party types have no national popularity...you have no comprehension of reality.
" “PROHIBITION is better than no liquor at all,” argued Will Rogers, Oklahoma's most famous cowboy. Clever minds in his home state are now hoping another ban on booze will bring better results. Starting this week, alcohol is outlawed from campus at the University of Oklahoma (OU).
The university's president, David Boren, a former Democratic senator, has forbidden fraternities and dorms from having alcohol on the premises (sororities are already dry). Even students who are 21 years old, and thus legally allowed to drink in the state, are now allowed to booze only at organised Friday and Saturday night events. Anyone caught violating this policy three times, on or off campus, will be suspended under a new “three-strikes” rule. (excerpt) The Economist, 22 Jan 2005
that's beautiful
Here's another to replace the double:
Turning the First Amendment into "Freedom from Religion" instead of Freedom of Religion." What a difference a pronoun makes.
It is suggested that kids are becoming smarter than their parents. ;0
Well, I can't argue that.
Serfs were farmers who were so subjugated by tyrants that they became virtual slaves on their own property. The more right someone else has to order you what to do, the more you become a serf. A businessman who is not free to manufacture the products he wants, the way he and his customers want it, the more he is restricted in who he can hire and fire and the more he is restrained from using his land the way he wants, the more that businessman is a serf.
Repealing alcohol Prohibition is leading to serfdom?!
You can tell a lot about a person by what the freedoms he values. I would trade my right to a beer for the right to manufacture vaccines. That right vanished with the federal vaccine act in 1994. Today doctors and drug manufacturers have become subservient to politicians, lawyers and courts who wield life and death authority over their trade.
Legalizing gold ownership in the 1970's is leading us back to serfdom?
More important is the right to develop mineral resources. That right has been slowly strangled over the years by extreme environmentalists in the EPA to the point where most new US resources come from other countries.
Abolishing sugar and gasoline rationing is leading us back to serfdom?
Rationing was a temporary measure during WWII. Today US taxpayers are forced to support sugar prices. Gasoline prices are high and sometimes shortages occur because of the myriad environmental regulations of gasoline that forces the serf-producers to formulate different varieties of gasoline.
Banishing Jim Crow laws is leading back to serfdom?
What good did it do them? Blacks are taken for granted by democrats who have used welfare to purchase their very right to get married and have a stable family. Today about 40% of young black men are under control of the criminal justice system. Inner cities are ruled by crooked politicians who have driven good people to the suburbs leaving the neighborhoods ridden with crime and poverty.
Repealing wage and price controls is leading us back to serfdom?
Wage controls are coming through a different door. Lawsuits are forcing employers to hire and promote unqualified people because of their race, sex or sexual preference.
Eliminating the 55 mile per hour national speed limit is leading us back to serfdom?
I would gladly trade the freedom to drive fast for the freedom to kill the cougar who menaces my children, or to shoot the bear that broke into my house, or drain the swamp on my land that breeds mosquitoes Today, you can pay a heavy fine for that privilege.
Sunsetting the Assault Weapons Ban is leading us back to serfdom?!
Not much good to have an assault weapon if you can't carry it. We used to be able to own fully automatic machine guns. We used to be able to carry weapons on commercial aircraft.
Killing the federal ban against commercial airline pilots packing heat is leading us back to serfdom?!
Read the fine print and you will realize that few pilots are going to jump through the all the hoops to take advantage of this. They have to travel to a remote area in the Southwest to take a rigorous training course. It used to be passengers could have guns in carry-on bags.
Legalizing the ability of citizens to use the Internet for profit is leading us back to serfdom?!
Didn't make much difference. It was never illegal for private computer networks to use internet protocol for their own networks. They would have just bypassed government networks.
Giving women the right to vote is leading us back to serfdom?!
But today politicians want to make it easy for illegal aliens and phantom voters to steal our elections. After they do that we will become serfs. The doctors at hospitals and clinics that were forced out of business along the Mexican border became serfs of politicians subservient to illegals. American serf-taxpayers are paying dearly for this new suffrage of illegals not just in dollars but also in crime.
It's no wonder that you 3rd Party types have no national popularity...you have no comprehension of reality.
The reality is that for every step that government takes back, it advances three steps forward. They give more freedom to homosexuals and prevent the rest of us from shunning them. They give rights to workers and take away the right of business to hire qualified people.
They tax everyone and give the money back to us provided we give up our rights -- purchasing our freedom.
They give tax dollars to politicians running for office but restrict out right to speak against them.
http://resourcescommittee.house.gov/archives/108/testimony/anncarpenter.htm
http://www.greenscissors.org/agriculture/sugar.htm
Why not? That's what it says, "Congress", not the states.
Businessmen aren't serfs. They do business where they choose to; even the communist Chinese can't stop that.
... And yet, vaccines are still being made. Go figure (perhaps hyperbole is not your friend, after all).
That said, anyone who thinks that I am not more free now at the age of 33 than my grandparents were at the same age is beyond delusional.
Real men don't whine.
Nonsense. On my land alone we mine the rock for your roads, sell water to local businesses, harvest timber for your homes, as well as have ample coal and iron for our industries. We've just drilled our latest oil well, too.
More broadly, the Bush Administration has just opened up vast new stretches of Alaskan property for mining and drilling...and existing federal law already permits you to force the government to sell federal land to you for less than $100 per acre where-ever you can establish profitable mining operations.
The EPA (and lawsuits) and such are problems, no doubt, but hardly on the scope that you claim.
"What good did it do them?"
Freedom for anyone helps free all of us in some little way, just as surely as slavery for anyone enslaves all of us at some level.
That you criticize such freedom belies your real motivation for threads such as this one, too...
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