Liberty lost
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Give me Liberty
Rodger Williamson
“A constitution of government once changed from freedom can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever. When the people once surrender their share in the legislature, and their right of defending the limitations upon the government, and of resisting every encroachment upon them, they can never regain it.”
The above quote is taken from a letter that was written on the seventh of July, in 1775, by John Adams, who was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as a delegate to the Continental Congress. On that day he took the time to reply to a letter to his wife, Abigail, who was at their home in Massachusetts, where she had described the recent actions by the British government in the Boston area.
At the time of writing, Adams still considered himself a British citizen, and his concerns were with the actions of the British government. However, those concerns are every bit as applicable today, here in these United States, as they were almost 250 years ago, and this is why I write this weekly opinion column, figuratively standing upon my soap box, crying the warnings of liberties lost.
The Bill of Rights enshrined the most basic of liberties that our government may never encroach upon. Yet, our government seems hellbent upon encroaching wherever it can. Biden and the Democrats wish to ban weapons in violation of your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
The NSA is harvesting electronic data upon everyone at an unimaginable scale, violating your Fourth Amendment right to privacy. Meanwhile our government, through proxy, has limited First Amendment right to free speech on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and not long ago limited your right to assembly during what was little more than a flu epidemic (that had a 99% survival rate).
I have written every week about the encroachments by our government upon our liberties, yet I can guarantee to you that what we already know about is only the tip of the iceberg.
Former slave Frederick Douglas famously cited in 1867 that “a man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, jury box and the cartridge box.” That phrase was an echo of a statement made earlier by South Carolina Governor Stephen Decatur Miller in 1830, where he said that “there are three, and only three, ways to reform our congressional legislation. The representative, judicial and belligerent principle alone can be relied on; or as they are more familiarly called, the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box. The two first are constitutional, the last revolutionary.”
So here we are, in October of 2022, with election day fast approaching less than a month away, and it is “Ballot Box” time! If you remember nothing else when you vote, remember that BOTH the Republicans AND the Democrats of our federal government have bipartisanly spent our nation into $31 trillion in debt, leaving you, the taxpayer, with an individual obligation of more than $247,000.
With that, if you are happy with the services that you have received for that amount of debt, then by all means, go ahead and vote for the Republicans and Democrats that worked together at the federal level to create that debt. And as you pay inflated prices at the gas pumps, remember that it was Kay Ivey that railroaded through an increased gas tax. And during these hard economic times, as surrounding states give their citizens tax breaks, remember that our current Alabama Legislature has voted to not refund any of the excessive amounts of taxes collected back to the citizenry.
However, if you, like me, are ready for something different, then remember that there will be Libertarians on the ballot this time, and Libertarians want to reduce government overreach and over-spending, and allow you the taxpayer to keep more of your hard-earned money to spend how you deem most appropriate.
I believe in the same liberty and freedom that John Adams believed in. I intend to do my part by voting on Tuesday the eigth of November, with the intent of trying to save what is left of this nation for our children and grandchildren to inherit. The Rs and the Ds have gotten us into this mess; it is time to try something different. Vote for liberty.