Recently
by Patrick J. Buchanan: Does
the South Belong in the Union?
“They that
can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety,
deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Ben Franklin
is much quoted in today’s debate on the trade-off between freedom
and security, as we learn about the National Security Agency’s easy
access to our phone records and emails.
Yet we Americans
have often sacrificed liberty for safety.
In World War
II, Korea and Vietnam, we conscripted millions of men and sent hundreds
of thousands to their deaths fighting against Italians, Germans,
Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese.
The greater
antagonist of liberty is not the quest for security, but our insatiable
demand and inexorable drive for equality — not equality of rights
but equality of results.
To equalize
incomes the government confiscates 40 percent of the earnings of
the most successful Americans and uses that wealth to subsidize
the food, health care, housing and income of that half of the nation
that pays no income taxes.
A steeply progressive
income tax was originally advanced by that great egalitarian Karl
Marx.
The federal
estate tax is 40 percent for the wealthy. Some states tack on 16
percent. Individuals may spend entire lives acquiring wealth for
their progeny. And governments, in the name of equality, will seize
half of it on their deaths. Socialism, said Winston Churchill, is
the philosophy of envy and gospel of greed.
To guarantee
equal pay for equal work, the government has created agencies to
monitor the payrolls of every business, agencies empowered to identify,
expose and punish employers who might dare to use their economic
freedom to reward some workers more than others.
To ensure racial,
ethnic and gender equality in the labor force and the front office,
the government fields thousands of agents to police the hiring,
promotion and dismissal decisions of executives.
Affirmative
action and quotas have been imposed on colleges and universities,
stripping those institutions of freedom of choice, to advance a
greater racial, ethnic and gender equality in student bodies and
on faculties than a free and fair competition might produce.
Contract set-asides
have been established on which no white male may bid. To make minorities
and women more equal, we make others less free.
Freedom of
assembly, which produced men’s and women’s clubs and colleges, has
been under assault for decades. Only a handful of men’s colleges
survive. Even Augusta National Golf Club was forced to conform to
the dictates of diversity and equality.
To achieve
greater equality in the test scores of Asian, white, Hispanic and
black children, enormous sums have been extracted from taxpayers
and shoveled into an educational establishment with little to show
for it in 50 years. Yet the clamor rises for more billions to achieve
this modern form of alchemy.
In a decades-long
intrusion on freedom that ignited a social rebellion, children were
forcibly bused out of their home neighborhoods across cities to
troubled schools to achieve a “racial balance.”
Why? Because
it was said that through a process of osmosis, underachievers could
attain greater equality with overachievers by having them sit beside
one another in classrooms. Parental freedom yielded to social dictation.
“A man’s home
is his castle,” was a concept we inherited from English law and
proudly adopted as our own. No more. A man’s right to sell or rent
his home is restricted by open housing laws.
Owners of hotels,
motels, taverns and restaurants can lose their licenses if they
conduct their businesses according to personal biases and beliefs.
In the land
of the free, such freedom is now illegal.
“If we are
truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another
must be equal, as well,” said Obama in his second inaugural. Thus,
homosexual unions will soon have to be treated equally with traditional
marriage, though “marriage equality” contradicts Christian teaching.
Our Union was
“founded on the principles of liberty and equality,” said Obama.
But how could that be when the word “equality” does not appear in
the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Federalist Papers?
Egalite is
rather a founding principle of Robespierre’s revolution, not ours.
It is ideological contraband smuggled into America and the enemy
of that freedom for which our fathers fought.
In 1776, Thomas
Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal in their God-given
rights to life and liberty. Does anyone think that Jefferson, who
kept slaves all his life, excoriated Indians in that same Declaration
of Independence and spoke of a “natural aristocracy” that Providence
had wisely provided to govern us, believed all men and all women
were equal in any other way?
In
The Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant wrote: “Leave
men free and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically,
as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire.
To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as
in Russia after 1917.
“Freedom and
equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails
the other dies.”
As the Party
of Equality triumphs, the Party of Freedom expires.
Happy Independence
Day!
July
4, 2013
Patrick
J. Buchanan [send
him mail] is co-founder and editor of The
American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books,
including Where
the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill,
Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide
of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? See his
website.
Copyright
© 2013 Creators Syndicate
The
Best of Patrick J. Buchanan
Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell