A Review of The Idea of America

I'll be outta town next week. Don't expect too many posts, but maybe. Light some fireworks, but remember that freedom means the government can't tell you how to live.

There is only 1 law. It's known by "God's Law", "The Golden Rule", "Common Law", etc. You can not infringe upon another soul's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and property. Period. End. 1 Law. Everything else is statutes.

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A Review of The Idea of America

http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/a-review-of-the-idea-of-america/

The Fourth of July is upon us again and a couple hundred million people in the middle latitudes of the North American continent are going to celebrate the birth of the United States. Most of them assume that this means they’ll also be celebrating being American, but that’s not necessarily so.

The United States is a political thing, one heir to the typical failings of politics, and the almost imperceptibly slow decay of republican virtue into nanny statism and imperial hubris.

America, however, is something different. It is not the same thing as the United States that seek to overlay it and to smother it. America is an idea that precedes the U.S. and, we like to believe, both transcends the nation-state and will outlive it.

As Thomas Paine says:

“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 one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

“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: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”

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