Can we ignore the truth?

I was reading an essay written by William Leggett during the Jacksonian era. The form of government that we now have is so far removed from that which was ever intended as to be nearly unrecognizable. I stumbled upon this through my blog roamings. Please visit Hamstermotor to catch the complete essay.

“Our own Government, most especially, has assumed and exercised an authority over the people, not unlike that of weak and vacillating parents over their children, and with about the same degree of impartiality…”

{…}

“…Our Government has thus exercised the right of dispensing favours to one or another class of citizens at will; of directing its patronage first here and then there; of bestowing one day and taking back the next; of giving to the few and denying to the many; of investing wealth with new and exclusive privileges, and distributing, as it were at random, and with a capricious policy, in unequal portions, what it ought not to bestow, or what, if given away, should be equally the portion of all.”

There was another line in the essay which, if taken to task holds the key to establishing that form of government upon which all freedoms depend and upon which the future also may depend.

“Time will remedy the departures which have already been made from this sound republican system, if the people but jealously watch and indignantly frown on any future attempts to invade their equal rights, or appropriate to the few what belongs to all alike.”

Unfortunately William Leggett has been proven incorrect when he concluded, “Time will remedy the departure”; instead, time has only given wings to the nightmare of socialism with unbridled fury and propelled it to a level and scope that he could hardly have imagined possible. I say that he could hardly have imagined such as possible only because he had no idea that our current populace of citizenry has been asleep, in a deep fog which has left them distanced from those important aspects of the America founded on sound principles and established with divine purpose. Are we willing to remedy the departures which have already been made?

That would mean doing away with an income tax system which penalizes success, abandoning affirmative action in all its various forms and discarding nearly every form of welfare. These programs have all been set up to redistribute wealth under the guise of assisting the needy or to make up for past injustices. These, our Congressmen and Senators, have established themselves as a new ruling class, that being contrary to the defining principles of our Republic, by usurping powers never granted unto them. Permitting government to usurp and then hold onto and manipulate the strings of prosperity, those powers originally reserved for individual citizens, has transformed freedom into servitude. Isn’t it time to wake up from this induced euphoria, that state of mind which supposes and assumes “something for nothing” without regard for consequences?

Let me warn you; as soon as you mention any of those sacred cows as possible sacrificial lambs you will be labeled as being without compassion, racist and mean spirited. Still up for the challenge?