Government Issued

During World War II, I was a G.I. (Government Issue). I gave up my rights for a cause bigger than me: defending America. We won World War II because most Americans agreed that our values were worth defending.

The War on Terror is a rights issue, a holy war sponsored by some Islamic nations. Many Americans feel that they are deprived of their rights, and sympathize with all who feel deprived. Who is qualified to hand out rights?

In America, the most benign Amendment to our Constitution, the Ninth, stipulates that “the enumeration of certain rights in the Constitution shall not prejudiced by other rights not so enumerated.” America’s makers and keepers of the law can’t think of a single instance where other amendments to the Constitution wouldn’t apply. (They use other amendments to give certain selected Americans what they call “preferred freedoms.”) As a matter of fact, they feel qualified to hand out rights, called “entitlements,” to their constituencies in the biggest income transfer in the history of the world. Millions of Americans, Government Issue, are dependent on government. They have given up their rights and responsibilities. And wouldn’t you know, America has never been more divided.

It is a nice thought to have such a caring government, Republicans and Democrats battling over who is going to give we, the people, the most. With the debt they have created, paid by the taxpayers, every family, not just the chosen people, could have made payments on a $200,000 home. Most of the nation is owned by a handful of billionaires, who have bought and paid for the politicians. Aristotle had this thought: “Of political justice, part is natural, part legal—natural, that which everywhere has the same force and does not exist by people’s thinking this or that; legal, that which is indifferent . . .” Justice is not a state contrivance but an institution of nature.

By Aristotle’s conception of natural justice, in his Politics, he put it to us this way: “To invest the law then with authority is, it seems, to invest God and reason only; to invest a man is to introduce a beast, as desire is something bestial, and even the best of men in authority are liable to be corrupted by passion. We may conclude then that the law is reason without passion and is therefore preferable to any individual.”

The rights issue in America is a prairie fire. Ambitious men with utopian goals hoping to better mankind’s lot are trying to force all the pieces to fit, and that’s exactly what America’s adversaries are doing. It’s the pot calling the kettle black. What do the authorities in control of our lives know about natural law? Look at history. Not one of those noble causes of ambitious men has ever worked for long. This American house divided will not long survive. There will be a change of the guard. Who knows what comes next? If we look at history, the picture isn’t pretty.