Too Many Un-American Americans
by Tibor R. Machan
I am not sure Senator Rand Paul’s political philosophy is all around sound but one portion has my support and should have everyone’s. It is his consistent defense of the (George) Washingtonian idea of limited government as it pertains to America’s foreign and military policies. This is especially true as it applies to his recent championing of withdrawing funding Egypt’s military.
Let us remember a simple yet revolutionary idea associated with America, indeed one that has made the country exceptional among all major and minor political associations. This is the basic, natural right to individual liberty!
In more or less complex renditions America has always been associated with the public philosophy that condemns one person’s using another for a purpose that this other doesn’t share. Very, very rarely, in some great emergency only, is it permissible for a person to coerce another, even for the most noble of reasons (something John Stuart Mill demonstrated with his example of forcibly preventing someone from stepping on a collapsing bridge.) That is why slavery was such a blemish in the history of this country, because it was the gravest of evils perpetrated, subjugating others to one’s own will without their consent! It was hypocritical, vile, embarrassing, corrupting.
No governmental policy that goes directly against the mandate by which government must operate -- “To secure the protection of individual rights!” -- is tolerable. Sadly this uniquely novel American idea is now cast aside by the likes of President Obama and his teach of petty tyrants. The notion that politicians, with their bureaucrats, ought to regiment the citizenry is all too often accepted by the citizenry itself, if only because the “public” educational system fails to teach what the American founders spelled out so clearly in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
Only if the idea of everyone’s fundamental right to liberty is recovered, will most of what ails us be addressed successfully.
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