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Thread: The People’s Pottage

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    The People’s Pottage

    An excerpt from Garet Garrett's The People’s Pottage in Garet Garrett: The Journalist Who Predicted Americans Would Sacrifice Liberty to a Government Leviathan on how despite or perhaps because of foundations in an ideology of individualism and egalitarianism power was centralized in the federal government.

    "About 1900 began the flowering of…the intellectual…a social theorist who knew…all about nothing, except how to subvert the traditions and invert the laws.

    "The first great turning…was the amendment of the Constitution in 1913, giving the Federal government power to impose a progressive tax on all incomes…one of the cardinal points of the Communist Manifesto.

    "Then the Federal government seized control of money, credit, and banking…After that it was merely nostalgic to talk any more of controlling government or limiting its powers of self-aggrandizement.

    "No one can imagine that [people] would have said yes…to accept the coils of octopean government, the dim-out of the individual...They voted against it…they elected Mr. Roosevelt on a platform that promised less government, a balanced Federal budget, and sound money.

    "They never voted for the Welfare State, with…its endless vista of confiscatory taxation, its compulsions and its police-like meddling with their private lives…Yet step by step they accepted it and liked it.

    "They never voted for whittling away the restraints imposed by the Constitution on the power of executive government…the sanctity of the Constitution was so strong that when Mr. Roosevelt proposed to…pack it with New Deal minds he was defeated by a spontaneous protest of extraordinary intensity.

    "Nevertheless…By a series of reinterpretations of the Constitution, the reformed Supreme Court has so relaxed the austerities of the supreme law as to give government a new freedom…Thus law is made subordinate to the discretions and judgments of men, whereas the cornerstone of freedom was that the government should be a government of law, not of men.

    "A momentous change has taken place in the relationship between government and people…people have lost control of government. It is a thing too vast, too complex, too pervasive…to be comprehended by the individual citizen. Indeed…the government no longer comprehends itself.

    "The power of the individual to resist the advance of its authority…has diminished. Even organized pressure groups…no longer resist. They ride it and use their influence to gain freer access to the illusory benefits that now flow in all directions from Washington.

    "The taxpayer…does not tell the bureaucrat; the bureaucrat tells him…a vast impersonal power…may legally take away his entire income.

    "Various administrative agencies…make and execute their own laws, thereby exercising legislative, executive, and judicial functions, all three at once.

    "The founders of the American government knew…all governments…had certain features in common, such as a natural appetite for power…What they did was to create a government that could not obey such a law.

    "When [government] goes into debt for what it calls the public welfare …it extends its authority over the lives and liberties of the people. It suborns them...corrupting the people for their own good.

    "As the government expands explosively the people…become dependent on government…first enticed by the benefits and then obliged by authority to exchange freedom for status…The moral debacle is cancerous and possibly incurable.

    "Unless people can reconquer government its bigness will swallow them up."
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Al Gore said it best............ ..One Nation, Under Law
    I will say this. Law is the tyrant
    For waltky: http://quakes.globalincidentmap.com/
    "The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."
    - Thucydides

    "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote" B. Franklin
    Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum

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    Quote Originally Posted by stjames1_53 View Post
    Al Gore said it best............ ..One Nation, Under Law
    I will say this. Law is the tyrant
    Well, it depends on whether those in power are subject to the law or make up the law to serve them.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    Well, it depends on whether those in power are subject to the law or make up the law to serve them.
    it really doesn't matter at the end of the day. The law is for the little people. power just means you either have enough to wield it to attack or to defend yourself. Money dictates which is which.
    You know I've said it before, there is no such thing as equality. That is a fairy tale, especially when it comes to Law.
    It is a tyrant and has been a tyrant since we kicked GB out of the country. We just traded one for another.
    For waltky: http://quakes.globalincidentmap.com/
    "The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."
    - Thucydides

    "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote" B. Franklin
    Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum

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    Quote Originally Posted by stjames1_53 View Post
    it really doesn't matter at the end of the day. The law is for the little people. power just means you either have enough to wield it to attack or to defend yourself. Money dictates which is which.
    You know I've said it before, there is no such thing as equality. That is a fairy tale, especially when it comes to Law.
    It is a tyrant and has been a tyrant since we kicked GB out of the country. We just traded one for another.

    Despite good intentions, The founders of the American government knew…all governments…had certain features in common, such as a natural appetite for power…What they did was to create a government that could not obey such a law," that tends to happen. And the people, as individuals, are helpless to prevent it.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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