Posts in "founders"

By Elliot Engstrom at 9:53PM

Mar 28, 2010

Kevin Carson: The Founders Were Extremists

And they were right. Carson comments on the fact that questioning the government, a concept that is simply unbelievable to many in our day in age, is the very principle upon which our country was founded. He writes:

...Today I heard Bart Stupak, referring to Michelle Bachmann’s allusion to Jefferson (“it’s a good thing to have a revolution every twenty years or so”), respond that we just had one in the last election. In this country, he said, we have our revolutions through the electoral process. “That’s what Jefferson meant by that quote,” he said. Um, no, it wasn’t. What Jefferson meant was the kind of revolution that Captain Shays was fighting in western Massachusetts at the time he wrote...
...As the anarchist Voltarine DeCleyre noted over a century ago, from the public schools’ accounts of the American Revolution you’d have difficulty understanding why it was even called a revolution, as opposed to just a patriotic foreign war against another country...

The Declaration of Indepence: Applicable Today

The Declaration of Independence had two major purposes -- to proclaim the states independent of British rule, and also to explain why these states had made such a declaration ("...a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.") So what does this document mean for us today? Is it simply a dead piece of paper? Absolutely not. Consider some of the statements Jefferson, the primary author, makes throughout the document concerning why independence had been declared:

...to secure these rights (of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed... ...whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government... ...when a long train of abused and usurpations...reduce(s) them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Aside from these general statements, consider some of the specific wrongs perpetrated by King George, and ask yourself if our government is not strikingly similar. For example:

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.