Although this is a story from an era long ago and seemingly far away, it has modern day implications for all those who feel like the Constitution of the United States of America actually means something.
The authors notes at the end of the story provide provide a reasonable action plan to get this country back on track and heading in the right direction.
It is a track that we never should have left in the first place.
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FROM THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC FREEDOM LIBRARY:
http://www.fee.org/library/default.asp?c=books
Not Yours to Give
By Colonel David Crockett
The famous American hero Davy Crockett, who died at the Alamo, colorfully articulates why government has neither the right nor the wisdom to take what others have produced and redistribute it to a politically privileged few in the name of charity.
http://www.fee.org/pdf/books/Not%20Yours%20to%20Give.pdf
Holders of political office are but reflections of the dominant leadership--good or bad--among the electorate.
Horatio Bunce is a striking example of responsible citizenship. Were his kind to multiply, we would see many new faces in public office; or, as in the case of Davy Crockett, a new Crockett.
For either the new faces or the new Crocketts, we must look to the Horatio in ourselves!
—Leonard E. Read
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All we have to do is look to this article to see how far adrift we are from the values our nation was founded upon. Congress builds a monument to its lack of understanding of the very document they are sworn to defend. UNBELIEVABLE.
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/dec/02/scholar-congressional-exhibits-too-liberal/
Scholar: Visitor center edits Constitution
Exhibit mangles, redefines the power, role of Congress
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Plenty of critics have accused Congress of forgetting the Constitution from time to time.
The 580,000-square-foot underground center provides a dignified, comfortable place to assemble before tours of the Capitol. One of its exhibit areas is seen here. (Joseph Silverman/The Washington Times)
But a constitutional scholar who has toured the new Capitol Visitor Center, a monument Congress built to itself that is to be dedicated Tuesday, goes even further, saying exhibits mangle the founding document by claiming constitutional backing for powers that are still very much in dispute.
Matthew Spalding, director of the Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation, says the visitor center selectively cuts passages from the Constitution, weighing in on a long-running debate about the scope and limits of federal power by taking the liberal side of that debate, envisioning broad congressional powers that the Founding Fathers never intended.
"I started looking at this stuff, and it's just patently absurd," he said. "The dominant message when you walk though the doors in this exhibit you're hit with is the role of Congress is to fulfill our greatest aspirations. So the message you're teaching these millions of visitors each year is the Constitution really isn't what we thought it was; it's the open-ended thing that's up to Congress to decide what it means."
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MORE WISDOM FROM THOMAS JEFFERSON:
"The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers [or the controlled Media in general]... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." --Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632
"I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government, enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretense of governing, they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate... Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor." - Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787. ME 6:58
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