5,000 Year Leap: Intro Day 1 - pages 1-33

Key points raised in class discussion during the Introduction – feel free to comment, disagree, clarify, question (this is primarily for our class participants - others are welcome, but will be deleted if unhelpful). I'll try to be briefer in the future but I don't have the time to write less today!

The principles known to our Founders era, the 28 principles of liberty, we need to learn, understand, and apply them to our world today. Talking with those who discount them about which Founder said what, will get a shrug... at best. But if we can describe how something can be better handled, and show them that their ‘liberal’ ideas actually restrict, confine, inhibit freedom and cause mayhem... you have a much better chance of getting them to think and question. The more we do that with friends, neighbors and co-workers, the more chance we have of restoring a Republic to us ‘if we can keep it’.

The initial colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth, both attempted forms of communistic organizations for their society, and both met with miserable and costly failure. What seemed to be good and high minded ideals as they were hatched in Europe, were exposed as folly in the harsh reality of America where there was no form of ‘other people’s money’ to spend – you did it right, or you died. Simple as that.

The colonists, through trial and error, found that people left to governing their own lives, making their own decisions and doing so without interfering with others doing the same, brought about successful communities. Fifty years before John Locke wrote his Second Treatise of Government, colonists in Connecticut formed what is arguably the first written constitution in history, defining a social contract, rule of law, elections, secret ballot, and freedom of speech before the law. They did so because they had direct experience of the basic principles which would become clearer and clearer by the Founding Father’s era.

Principles are general rules which have been proven true and effective for thinking and acting successfully in reality. Without benefit of principles, you are forced to deal with each and every situation that comes along as some new particular. The video used principles of Mathematics as an example, that if you don’t know your multiplication tables, you are either forced to count each particular one by one, or trust any sincere sounding person who tells you what the answer is.

Another example is learning to read – you can do so by learning the principles of phonics, or by memorizing the look of particular words. Phonics takes a little more time up front learning the sounds of letters and their various combinations, but once done, you can read and sound out any word you might ever come across.

See and Say gets you ‘reading’ quickly by memorizing the look of particular common everyday words, and guessing at others based on them... but beyond a relative handful sized vocabulary... you are stuck and have no way to sound out or read anything that is not familiar to you.

Principles require up front effort and knowledge, but free you to be successful.

Dealing with every issue as it comes up, gives you the feeling of doing something, but ends in failure.

Phonics is a principled method of dealing with the reality of the English language.

See and Say was a proregressive (progressive... I can’t leave out the ‘re’) ‘discovery!’ which has devastated literacy amongst American school children for a century.

Invariably the leftist solution to every problem, is to disregard principles (usually as ‘old fashioned’ or ‘restrictive’) and deal with particular issues as if everything is unique and requires (irrelevant) calls for sympathy.

The left will always try to substitute various particulars they feel would be good, for the principles we know from hard experience are true. It isn’t always obvious though, the best of them will try and shuffle the meaning of things you thought you understood, and replace them with their notions, as this quote from Cass Sunstein shows, from Chp. 2 of his book, “The Second Bill of Rights” and see if you can spot the danger:

"In a nutshell, the New Deal helped vindicate a simple idea: No one really opposes government intervention. Even the people who most loudly denounce government interference depend on it every day. Their own rights do not come from minimizing government but are a product of government. The simplest problem with laissez-faire is not that it is unjust or harmful to poor people, but that it is a hopelessly inadequate description of any system of liberty, including free markets. Markets and wealth depend on government."

The half truth shuffle here is deft- you can easily enter into that paragraph secure in your beliefs, yet come out of it on the other side shaking your head and looking around for signs of their escape.

The technique of the left is to Equivocate and Particularize, IOW, to 'divert the meaning of a term into something else while keeping the appearance of using the same words, trading away principles for material substitutes'. Keep your eye on the magicians other hand that he’s trying to keep hidden:

• " government intervention" - confuses the principles which good govt should act from in the defense of citizens rights – and which in many contexts can and must intrude into individuals lives (police, trials, laws, etc) - , with the very different actions of government usurping your rights in order to enforce its own assumed powers over you and every choices you’d like to make. Two very different meanings.
• "are a product of government" - seeks to further confuse 'Laws' with 'Rights'. Laws certainly are a product of government,  but Rights are not a product of Laws or of government, not in the American sense. Rights are derived from the reality of our nature as human beings, and it is their defense which is the central purpose of government, Laws are tools to restrain and channel government actions in order to uphold and defend Rights – Laws are to protect our Right to take actions we choose to take – laws are not to produced to take the results of your actions as goodies to be distributed.
• 'depend on government' – we depend upon govt to defend our rights and uphold the rule of law in order to promote the ‘General Welfare’, but Sunstein’s usage equates protecting rights with being the source of Rights, which is nothing more than saying that a security guard should ‘rightfully’ becomes the defacto owner of the mall he protects, because the owners depend on him to keep them secure.  

In Sunsteins view, and of the left in general, the govt is cast as the source of your rights, the ‘rightful’ owner of your property, and so is justified to control, regulate and distribute your property for the ‘general welfare’ of those in society they decide are in need of it – social justice.

Freedom and Liberty DO depend upon Government, but on a limited government, one which upholds and defends your Right to pursue the form of happiness you choose, a Government 'of Laws and not men'; your freedom and liberties are taken away by a government that can tell you what particular things you will be given a right to, and how much of those it will decide you should be 'happy' with.

The left takes ideas and Principles which enable successful behavior, and converts them into particular things it claims you need to be ‘successful’. In the hands of the proregressive leftist,

• Education changes from understanding the good ideas that liberate, to training you how to gather a liberal amount of goods;
• Property Rights change from having a property right in that which has been produced through your life, to being given property you have a 'right' to expect just for living;
• Free Speech goes from the freedom to speak your mind on an issue which others may or may not choose to listen to, to having a right to hear only those things you want to hear - and the right to expect everyone to listen to your words on what you know they should hear, and to not be confused by ‘hateful’ speech opposing what you want to hear.

Simply put, if America has any meaning of Liberty and Justice associated with it, then:

• Anti-Constitution + Anti-Property Rights  + Anti-Free Market + Anti-Free Speech = Anti-American