Janice Rogers Brown: “Where government advances—and
it advances relentlessly—freedom is imperiled...When did
government cease to be a necessary evil and become a goody bag
to solve our private problems?”
Thomas Paine: “Society in every state is a blessing, but
Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil;
in its worst state, an intolerable one.”
George Mason: “Every society, all government, and every
kind of civil compact therefore, is or ought to be, calculated
for the general good and safety of the community. Every power,
every authority vested in particular men is, or ought to be,
ultimately directed at this sole end; and whenever any power
or authority whatever extends further...than is in its nature
necessary for these purposes, it may be called government, but
it is in fact oppression.”
Thomas Jefferson: ‘What more is necessary to make us a
happy and a prosperous people?...a wise and frugal Government,
which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave
them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry
and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the
bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government...”
Janice
Rogers Brown: “Where
government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates
and our ability to control
our own destiny atrophies.”
Thomas Paine: “Some writers have so confounded society
with government, as to leave little or no distinction between
them; whereas they are not only different, but have different
origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by
our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively
by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining
our vices...The first is a patron, the last a punisher.”
Thomas Jefferson: “The right of self-government does not
comprehend the government of others.”
George Washington: “It will be found an unjust and unwise
jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty on the supposition
that he may abuse it.”
Janice
Rogers Brown: “All
perspectives are not equal...there are ideas worth defending
to the death... Freedom is not free.
And it will never be the lasting legacy of the lazy or the indifferent.”
James Wilson: “Government...should be formed to secure
and enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members;
and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal
object, is not a government of the legitimate kind.”
George Mason: “...no free government, or the blessings
of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by… frequent
recurrence to fundamental principles.”
Benjamin Franklin: “Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon
us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of
God and nature.”
Janice
Rogers Brown: In his famous, all too famous, dissent in Lochner, Justice
Holmes wrote that the ‘constitution
is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether
of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the
State or of laissez faire’...he was simply wrong.”
Thomas Jefferson: “The legitimate powers of government
extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.”
George Washington: “Liberty will find itself...where the
Government... [will] maintain all in the secure and tranquil
enjoyment of the rights of person and property.”
James Madison: “The real measure of the powers meant to
be granted to Congress by the Constitution is to be sought in
the specifications... not...with a latitude that, under the name
or means for carrying into execution a limited Government, would
transform it into a Government without limits.”
Janice
Rogers Brown: “...collectivism was (and is) fundamentally
incompatible with the vision that undergirded this country’s
founding. The New Deal, however, inoculated the federal Constitution
with a kind of underground collectivist mentality. The Constitution
itself was transmuted into a significantly different document...”
Patrick Henry: “...liberty ought to be the direct end of
your government.”
Thomas Jefferson: “The true foundation of republican government
is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property
and in their management.”
Samuel Adams: “...it is the greatest absurdity to suppose
it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering
into society, to renounce their essential rights, or the means
of preserving those rights. “
Janice
Rogers Brown: “At its founding and throughout its
early history, this regime revered private property ...The Founders
viewed the right of property as ‘the guardian of every
other right.’”
John Adams: “Property must be secured, or liberty cannot
exist.”
James Madison: “The diversity in the faculties of men,
from which the rights of property originate...The protection
of these faculties is the first object of government.”
George Mason: “Frequent interference with private property
and contracts...must disgust the best and wisest part of the
community, occasion a general depravity of manners, bring the
legislature into contempt…”
Janice
Rogers Brown: “Protection of private property was
a major casualty of the Revolution of 1937...Rights were reordered
and property acquired a second class status. If the right asserted
was economic, the court held the Legislature could do anything
it pleased...Something new, called economic rights, began to
supplant the old property rights...With the advent of ‘economic
rights,’ the original meaning of rights was effectively
destroyed. These new ‘rights’ imposed obligations,
not limits, on the state. It thus became government’s job
not to protect property but, rather, to regulate and distribute
it.”
James Madison: “In a just and free government...the rights
both of property and of persons ought to be effectually guarded.”
John Adams: “The moment the idea is admitted into society
that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there
is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy
and tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou
shalt not steal’ were not commandments of heaven, they
must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can
be civilized or made free.”
Thomas Jefferson: “It [is]...ridiculous to suppose that
a man had less rights in himself than one of his neighbors, or
indeed all of them put together. This would be slavery, and not
that liberty which the bill of rights has made inviolable, and
for the preservation of which our government has been charged.”
Janice
Rogers Brown: “Once again a majority of this court
has proved that ‘if enough people get together and act
in concert, they can take everything and not pay for it.’ But
theft is theft. Theft is theft even when the government approves
of the thievery...The right to express one’s individuality
and essential human dignity through the free use of property
is just as important as the right to do so through speech, the
press, or the free exercise of religion.”
Thomas Jefferson: “To take from one...in order to spare
to others...is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of
association--the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of
his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”
John Adams: “Each individual of the society has a right
to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty,
and property...no part of the property of any individual can,
with justice, be taken from him, or applied to public uses, without
his own consent...”
John Dickinson: “…we cannot be HAPPY, without being
FREE...we cannot be free, without being secure in our property...
we cannot be secure in our property, if, without our consent,
others may, as by right, take it away...”
Janice
Rogers Brown: “Government
acts as a siphon, extracting wealth, creating privilege and
power, and redistributing it.”
John Dickinson: “…the single question is whether
[government] can legally take money out of our pockets, without
our consent. If they can, our boasted liberty is but ‘sound
and nothing else.’”
Thomas Paine: “We still feel the greedy hand of government
thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and
grasping at the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually
exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation.
It watches property as its prey and permits none to escape without
a tribute.”
George Washington: “[government] has no more right to put
their hands into my pockets, without my consent, than I have
to put my hands into yours...”
Janice
Rogers Brown: “...the
Constitution, once the fixed chart for our aspirations, has
been demoted...”
Alexander Hamilton: “...the courts of justice are to
be considered as the bulwarks of a limited Constitution against
legislative encroachments.”
Thomas Jefferson: “No man has a natural right to commit
aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from
which the laws ought to restrain him.”
James Madison: “...laws are unconstitutional which infringe
on the rights of the community...government should be disarmed
of powers which trench upon those particular rights...”
Janice
Rogers Brown: “[T]he courts overcame these alleged
limitations on their powers with ridiculous ease. How? By constitutionalizing
everything possible, finding constitutional rights which are
nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. By taking a few words
which are in the Constitution like “due process” and “equal
protection” and imbuing them with elaborate and highly
implausible etymologies; and by enunciating standards of constitutional
review which are not standards at all but rather policy vetoes,
i.e., strict scrutiny and the compelling state interest standard.”
Alexander Hamilton: “The complete independence of the courts
of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited Constitution...which
contains certain specified exceptions to the legislative authority...Limitations
of this kind can be preserved in practice no other way than through
the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare
all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void.
Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges
would amount to nothing...No legislative act, therefore, contrary
to the Constitution can be valid. To deny this would be to affirm...that
men acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers
do not authorize, but what they forbid...whenever a particular
statute contravenes the Constitution, it will be the duty of
the judicial tribunals to adhere to the latter...to guard the
Constitution and the rights of individuals...”
James Madison: “...the powers of the federal government
are enumerated...it has legislative powers on defined and limited
objects, beyond which it cannot extend its jurisdiction.”
Thomas Jefferson: Our legislators are not sufficiently apprised
of the rightful limits of their power: that their true office
is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties
and to take none of them from us.”
Janice
Rogers Brown: We are heirs to a mind-numbing bureaucracy; subject
to a level
of legalization that cannot avoid being arbitrary,
capricious, and discriminatory. What other outcome is possible
in a society in which no adult can wake up, go about their business,
and return to their homes without breaking several laws?”
Benjamin Franklin: “In free governments, the rulers are
the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns. “
Thomas Paine: “When I contemplate the natural dignity of
man…I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind
by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools…”
Thomas Jefferson: “...rightful liberty is unobstructed
action according to our own will within limits drawn around us
by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the
limits of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s
will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.”
Janice
Rogers Brown: “Curiously, in the current dialectic,
the right to keep and bear arms—a right expressly guaranteed
by the Bill of Rights—is deemed less fundamental than implicit
protections the court purports to find in the penumbras of other
express provisions. But surely, the right to preserve one’s
life is at least as fundamental as the right to preserve one’s
privacy.”
Samuel Adams: “Among the natural rights of the colonists
are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly
to property; together with the right to support and defend them
in the best manner they can.”
James Wilson: “The defense of one’s self, justly
called the primary law of nature, is not, nor can it be, abrogated
by any regulation...”
James Dickinson: “For WHO ARE A FREE PEOPLE? Not those,
over whom government is reasonable and equitably exercised, but
those, who live under a government so constitutionally checked
and controlled, that proper provision is made against its being
otherwise exercised.”
Janice
Rogers Brown: “If we are committed to a rule of
law that applies equally to ‘minorities as well as majorities,
to the poor as well as the rich,’ we cannot countenance
standards that permit and encourage discriminatory enforcement.”
Benjamin Franklin: “An equal dispensation of protection,
rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled
to, and ought to enjoy...”
James Madison: “...it would be the interest of the majority
in every community to despoil and enslave the minority of individuals...re-establishing,
under another name and a more specious form, force as the measure
of right...”
Thomas Jefferson: “...the minority possess their equal
rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be
oppression.”
Janice
Rogers Brown: “Liberty
was sacrificed for the common good, and eventually calcified
into the tyranny of the State
above all.”
George Washington: “It has always been my creed that we
should not be left as an awful monument to prove, ‘that
Mankind, under the most favorable circumstances, are unequal
to the task of Governing themselves, and therefore made for a
Master.’”
James Madison: “If Congress can employ money indefinitely...the
powers of Congress would subvert the very foundation, the very
nature of the limited government established by the people of
America.”
Thomas Jefferson: “A sound spirit of legislation...banishing
all arbitrary and unnecessary restraint on individual action,
shall leave us free to do whatever does not violate the equal
rights of another.”
Echoing
The Extremists Who Founded America
