Sic Semper Tyrannis

I met up with two good friends of mine for dinner the other night, one of them dating back to second grade.  We used to get together during high school and solve this country's problems.  Back then Jimmy Carter was the President, the U.S. was a net creditor country to the world, the country had just gone off the gold standard a few years earlier and we had very little Federal Government debt, especially as a ratio to GDP.  In other words, this country and its citizens still had a chance.

Now this country has over 50% of the population receiving some form of Government support, our true Federal Debt - including items like FNM/FRE/GMAC/Student Loan guarantees is well in excess of 160% of GDP and we run a monthly trade deficit averaging about $50 billion.  To make matters worse, we have a President who never had a real private sector job in his life, is the emblematic beneficiary of affirmative action and ACLU policies and professes that anyone who built his own business owes his success to the Government.  The only thing Obama likely ever built was the bong he used in college to smoke weed.

Back in the late 1970's, if someone had told my friends and I that this is how the U.S. would end up, we would have laughed at them in disbelief.  Now we shudder in horror for what we know is likely to come. One of my friends shared a letter he wrote to other friend on the 4th of July and has graciously allowed me to share it with the readers of this blog.  This is worth reading more than once:

My Dear Professor,

Salutations on this 236th Anniversary of the adoption of Mr. Jefferson's noble writing proclaiming us free of the tyranny of Great Britain and its odious King.  I hope that you and your beautiful family have plans to observe the occasion festively. 

It is for me an occasion at once happy and solemn.   A friend wrote me this morning to wish me "happy freedom" day.  I was struck by that language.

I fear that we have rather more license,  i.e., leave of the government, than freedom. We are increasingly a nation of men, rather than a nation of laws. Increasingly, we depend upon the permission of the government to conduct our lives, rather than the government depending on the consent of the governed to conduct its affairs.  I think some of the more inspiring founding fathers would be as sickened by what the government has become, as amazed by what the continent has become.  There is precious little virtue left in the government we have instituted, and the officers appointed to it, and too much self-interest. 

Even John Roberts' recent act applying time-honored, though presently unfashionable precepts of jurisprudence smacks less of courage or principle than it does of self-interest; it seems to me more an effort to rub some of the tarnish off his posterior for posterity than concern for the integrity of the institution.  He cannot with one such act undo the damage he and his ideologue friends have done to undermine the integrity of the once-high court recently.  It is not for the whoremonger to restore virtue to the harlot.

We would do well today to recall the sentiment animating the courageous men at Philadelphia 236 summers ago, and to reflect upon the question whether our government has not in its arrogance and insensitivity to the affairs of its subjects (for that is what we increasingly are) become too much like the tyrant indicted in the great Declaration they then adopted:

"When kings the sword of justice first lay down, They are no kings,
 though they possess the crown, Titles are shadows, crowns are empty
 things, The good of subjects is the end of kings."

A toast then, to the revolution and revolutionaries that created us, and a prayer for the rebirth of the liberating spirit that moved them!  May we find that spirit again before it is too late!

Vive la Revolution! Sic semper tyrannis!

"Sic  semper tyrannis" is a Latin phrase commonly used as a rallying cry against the tyranny of Government.

Two of us in the group, the author of the above letter and myself, have concluded that the only way to fix this country now is a pushing of the "reset" button.  A popular revolution, which includes burning down the existing system and rebuilding everything entirely, starting with original Bill of Rights as the basis.  Until that happens, it doesn't matter which party controls the Oval office or either side of Congress because it's the Government and its banking/corporate providers that control us.

Until then - Atlas shrugs.