One of the factors that caused the American Revolution in 1776 was the unwillingness of citizens of colonial America to put up with the tyranny of an elite ruling class. The Declaration of Independence centered on several “truths” that were claimed to be “self evident” to the Founders as they pulled the trigger of revolt, risking their lives, their fortunes, and their fates.
First, they declared that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”. While the Founders recognized numerous “rights”, many of which they would specifically enumerate a decade later in a “Bill of Rights”, the essential three they emphasized in their Declaration were the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Equality under the “rule of law”, replacing the tyrannical tendencies of the “rule of man”, became the philosophical lynchpin of human governance in this new nation. It would be, as President Abraham Lincoln would affirm at Gettysburg nearly a century later, a government representing a “new birth of freedom”, constituted, “of the people, by the people, and for the people”. Indebted to those who have established and sustained liberty in America, it is our duty, and the duty of every generation of American citizens, to assure, as Lincoln declared, that such government by its citizens’ consent, “shall not perish from the earth”, or from this nation.
Over the last several years, an alarm has been sounding that the liberty established by our founders and fought for by every generation since, is in the gravest danger of our nation’s short history. Seemingly simple problems continue to vex our nation, from providing energy from our own abundant natural resources, to understandable and equitable taxation, to defining the boundaries of government intervention vs. personal responsibility, to out of control government debt and deficit spending that makes us virtually a nation of slaves to our own government and the nations who own US debt. It’s as if a nation of 300,000,000 citizens has become enslaved to a clan of 537 elite rulers under the Capitol dome and in the White House, able neither to shake the shackles of their masters, nor to exercise their own ingenuity and overcome the obstacles to their happiness and prosperity.
Have we forfeited liberty for a new form of tyranny? There is certainly a clue in recent reporting by USA Today, in an article by Dennis Cauchon, on exploding salaries on the payroll of the US federal government. According to Cauchon, 1 out of 5 federal employees are now earning salaries of $100,000 or more, with the average salary for a federal government employee at $71,206. Compare that to the average salary of US citizens working in a private sector job, who earns just $40,331. Add to that the fact that federal government employees become vested in a defined benefits pension after working only five years, compared to citizens working in the private sector investing in defined contribution retirement programs, with defined benefit plans having been nearly eliminated from the landscape. Looking at the disparity between the citizenry and the occupants of their government, you begin to get the picture of what’s wrong with America in the 21st century. The condition of private citizens in America has come full circle, all the way back to the same conditions of ruling class subjugation that led to our original Revolution. As Lincoln once said when linking the institution of slavery to the tyranny that led to that Revolution, our government and its inhabitants have rekindled that evil spirit in corrupt men that states, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it”.
Acting according to our US Constitution, we choose and elect from among our peers, “representatives” of our will and interests to serve in our US federal government. The problem is, as an 18th century British Prime Minister astutely noted, “Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it”. In a nation where the median household income is about $55,000 a year, having a so-called representative government whose elected occupants pull down a base salary of $174,000 a year should be a clear indication. This time, the “self evident truths” show that the power of government and its occupants is grossly out of control, and the government constituted by our founders, has certainly become more than corrupt, extinguishing the liberty it was designed to protect. Once again in America’s unfolding history, the battle of “right” vs. “wrong”, between the “rule of law” and the “rule of man”, between “liberty” and “tyranny” is being waged in a fight to determine the fate of the human condition in America. It is fitting that America, with its government “established in liberty”, but occupied by corruptible men, should find itself once again embroiled in the continuing “American Revolution”.