America's Republic - if we can keep it
By Fred Elbel on 12 November 2018
The immigration issue essentially boils down to the question: Are we a sovereign nation? Do we have the right - and the responsibility - to control and limit who comes in to our country, from where, and for what reason? In other words, immigration is a subset of the sovereignty issue.
The following article describes how and why our sovereign nation was founded. It presents important historical information, yet is quite readable. It's worth reading.
Here are but a few excerpts:
America’s Republic: How the Great Experiment Came About (and How We Keep It) - A brief history of America, its founding documents, and what we can do to keep the flame of liberty burning bright, by Lawrence W. Reed, Foundation for Economic Education, November 09, 2018:
... I revere America’s founding documents and the people who crafted them. In the long struggle of men and women against tyranny, what that generation accomplished stands without comparable precedent.
Judge Them within Context
As we survey what they did, I caution you from the outset to avoid the sin of intertemporal bigotry—judging those of the late 18th Century by standards and conventions of the early 21st. This ought to be seen as fair and commonsensical, yet I see people commit that sin all the time. The more extreme say, “Thomas Jefferson was a bad man and shouldn’t be listened to because he owned slaves,” for instance.
Every time I hear that, I think to myself, “Just like this critic, Thomas Jefferson wasn’t perfect but he did more for liberty in a week than that forgettable critic will likely do in his lifetime.” It may make you feel good for the moment to engage in some self-righteous breast-beating or sanctimonious virtue-signaling, but you betray your ignorance by displaying such bigotry....
America's Historical Significance
The Declaration of Independence of 1776 had a profound impact upon the world at the time, and it still resonates. It had to be written before there could even be a Constitution, for obvious reasons. And the ideas that went into it were very much on the minds of the men who gathered in Philadelphia 11 years later to create the Constitution....
When it came to ideas, the men who wrote the Declaration in 1776 were products of the Enlightenment. Because they demanded rational thought, they came to reject the facetious and pompous claims of governments—that citizens existed to serve the state. The writings of scholars like John Locke and David Hume imbued in them a healthy respect for the individual....
A Series of Tyrannical Events
The 16-year period from George III’s ascendancy until the Declaration was punctuated by a series of conflicts and controversies, some of which I will mention here:...
Then came the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. No greater assembly of genius, wisdom, accomplishment, and experience has ever been held for the purpose of creating a government and securing for its people the blessings of liberty....
Here, in a nutshell, is what the delegates to the Convention did—and they did it not just for themselves and their generation, but for all generations of Americans:...
Have We Lost Our Way?
In the more than two centuries since the Constitution was written, the federal government in America has grown far beyond what our Founders ever intended. That raises an important question: For the purpose of keeping government limited, has the Constitution failed us, or have we failed the Constitution? That’s a discussion I think we definitely ought to have, and the deeper the better. I don’t believe even the Founders themselves would argue that assumptions should never be questioned. I for one would love to be able to turn the clock back to 1787 for a moment and add some additional strictures on government the Founders didn’t incorporate or envision.
Nonetheless, in the pantheon of documents of governance, the Constitution surely must rank as one of the greatest gifts ever bestowed by one generation upon the next and future generations. With liberty as their watchword, these brave and wise men, who had been through the crucible of war and who had put their lives, fortunes and sacred honor on the line, produced a document unlike any other ever crafted before or since. But the words of Benjamin Franklin as he was leaving the Convention should remind us that it isn’t enough to sustain liberty to simply declare it in writing. A woman supposedly asked, “Mr. Franklin, what form of government have you given us.” His reply: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”...