Posted on 09/18/2005 9:30:23 PM PDT by betty boop
Dearest sister in Christ, I’m confident that we’ll need your indispensable and ever-gracious help as co-sponsor of this Freeper Research Project….
FYI. Please join in if you have the time and interest. And if you do, please don’t hesitate to ping your friends….
BUMP
Bookmark for tomorrow. Looks like a good one.
It is my honor to help you in any way I can, my dear sister in Christ!!!
Very interesting! Good job! My thoughts:
http://www.neoperspectives.com/foundingoftheunitedstates.htm
Feel free to use any of the above in your final write up, please ping me when you finish!
btw, some other good quotes:
Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization, & a very unexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants.
Thomas Jefferson
If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress. Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America.
James Madison
The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. ... The remaining revenue on the consumption of foreign articles, is paid cheerfully by those who can afford to add foreign luxuries to domestic comforts, being collected on our seaboards and frontiers only, and incorporated with the transactions of our mercantile citizens, it may be the pleasure and pride of an American to ask, what farmer, what mechanic, what laborer, ever sees a tax-gatherer of the United States?
- Thomas Jefferson (Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1805)
ping
With respect to a historical subject such as this, IMHO we read too many books and not enough documents. Surely, our founding ancestors would be utterly amazed to learn of some of the things they said, thought, and did.
I haven't the link, but it's easy to google: type in Constitutional Society , click on Liberty Library , and start browsing. Warning: it's addictive, you may come to hate me.
Thanks, betty, for this opportunity.
What has "gone wrong" is that there isn't any recourse for judges who are incompetent. In the real world your pay is based on your performance.
I keep hearing people squawk that judges should have a fixed term, say 10 years, so the incompetent ones can be pushed out. I have a better idea - base their pay, benefits, and retirement on their performance.
Take the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, for example. Three-quarters of all of their rulings are overturned. We should take away three-quarters of their pay, benefits, and retirement for the year they make the lousy rulings. That should give them plenty of incentive to make rulings based on the Constitution instead of their will.
This might interest you two.
*HUGS!*
Thank you for posting this most interesting thread!
I am interested in what has gone wrong with the First Amendment. How has freedom of religion- granted to us by our forefathers, including the rather secular Jefferson and Franklin- devolved into what seems to be becoming a godless society?
And how do we reclaim our society's values without ramming one particular set of values down people's throats with a gun barrel?
Does anyone have a source for the legend about the original draft of the Declaration of Independence reading ". . . life, liberty and property" instead of 'pursuit of happiness'?
Hi Ostlandr! I don't think that's a legend. The Framers — and especially Thomas Jefferson — were very heavy borrowers from John Locke who was the "father of the Glorious Revolution of 1688" as mentioned in the article at the top of this thread. Locke was a philosopher of the natural law/natural rights school. And he had seemingly concluded that inalienable rights can inhere in man only if they are endowed by a Higher Authority (so to speak). His three main inalienable rights were life, liberty, and property.
Now Thomas Jefferson was a close student of Locke. He knew everything that Locke had to say about natural law and the inalienable rights of persons. Although Locke's list survived verbatim through the first few drafts of the Declaration of Independence (co-authored by Franklin and Jay -- until those two worthy gentlemen realized that TJ was "on a tear," and so delicately withdrew into the background), Jefferson decided in the end (for whatever reason) to replace "property" with "the pursuit of happiness."
Personally, I am clueless why he would want to do that. "Property" is "concrete," tangible; and thus readily understandable by virtually everybody.
But "whut the hay" is "happiness?" You simply cannot quantify it. It might as well be a total illusion, or a chimera or unicorn flitting about. It means something different to every single human person in existence.
Truly I find Jefferson most perplexing on this point (and on some others as well). And so I gather: Not for nothing has he been called "The American Sphinx."
Thank you so much for writing, Ostlandr!
Thank you for those quotes.
My God, how far we have fallen.
Late bookmark and a bump for manana!
bump
Ah,but is it? If the word "property" can be defined as a physical item, or items, with a verifiable market value that can be legally bought,sold, acquired, held in trust, or inherited then comes the question --- Are human beings property?
If so, then the original wording of the Declaration of Independence reading ". . . life, liberty and property" could very well have been interpreted as approving the "peculiar institution" of Slavery.
And, as we all know, Jefferson -- among many members of the Constitutional Convention -- was a slaveholder; albeit many were not, and some among them were firm abolitionists.
--Clarence Thomas, Justice, concurring, Printz v. U.S., 521 U.S. 898 (1997)
"Marshaling an impressive array of historical evidence, a growing body of scholarly commentary indicates that the "right to keep and bear arms" is, as the Amendment's text suggests, a personal right."
--Clarence Thomas, Justice, Printz v. U.S., Footnote 2.
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