Why do we have a government?
Or maybe it is better to ask, what is a government, our government,
supposed to be doing?
I know what a lot of people think the government should be
doing, but our country fought a war in order to be able to write the
Constitution that we have now. They
rejected the government they had and fought with guns for the right to create a
new one, this one.
Some people are hoping that enough people aren’t paying
attention while they try to change our government to do what they want and
ultimately to change our country. They
are also hoping that enough people don’t know what our government is supposed
to be doing, which would make their job a lot easier.
The purposes of our government are best described in the
Declaration of Independence and in the Preamble to our Constitution.
The Declaration of Independence says that people “are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” and “that to secure
these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” The people have the right “to alter or to
abolish” any form of government that becomes “destructive of these ends” and “to institute new Government,” one that “shall
seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Government is supposed to “effect [our] safety and
happiness.” The first thing we need to
understand about government, our government, is that it exists to promote the
welfare and happiness of the people of the United States.
But doesn’t our government have any responsibility for
people in other nations? It’s hard to be
responsible for people when you can’t change or control their politics, their
beliefs, their economy, or their government.
But what about those people who want to come here to gain a
better life?
You can start with the between 19 and 55 million refugees in
the world today, depending on who’s counting.
If we are expected to place as many refugees as possible in our own
country, then simply put, we have two options: We can intervene in these
countries, choose sides, and try to resolve the issues that are creating these
refugees, most likely with our military, or we can let these countries
disintegrate and try to pick up what pieces we can.
But then how many can or should we take in, and who says how
many that is? But then will we be placing
the needs, welfare, and happiness of other people over our own? That is basically the reason why they fought
the War for Independence in the first place.
But wait. We have
always been a nation of immigrants.
True, and any person not yet living here is a potential immigrant. If any person who wants to come here has a
right to come here, then we are placing the needs, welfare, and happiness of
other people over our own. So the
question is how to set an immigration policy that upholds the government we
fought a war to get but one that is still compassionate to other people in
need.
Government is supposed to “effect” our safety and
happiness. We may differ exactly how it
is supposed to do that, but it should be clear that it is not the place of
government to do things over the will of the people and then tell them to like
it.
Nor is the government to do anything that risks our
safety. The world is experiencing today
an epidemic of terrorist activity by Muslims.
Some people are denying that Islam itself is the problem. They want to insist that people who are prone
to violence and murder are just using Islam as an excuse for their
behavior. Why this isn’t a problem for
other religions is not discussed.
We are spending billions of dollars every year tracking over
a million people on our terror watch list, hoping to catch these people between
the time they do something illegal and the time when they actually kill
people.
Why are we doing this?
But the debate is going on.
Our government is acting as though there is no debate. The American people are not convinced. So the government is not effecting our safety
and happiness by insisting on allowing, encouraging, and accepting millions of
Muslims into our country. I say
millions, because this is not limited to just this recent migrant/refugee
crisis. Our immigration policies have
favored Muslims almost to the exclusion of other people groups for at least the
term of our current President.
And what does the Constitution say is the purpose of the
government, our government?
The answer is found in the Preamble to our Constitution,
which reads like this:
“We the People of the
United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure
domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general
Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do
ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America ...
The first named purpose of our government is to form a more perfect Union.
Originally this idea of a more perfect union would have
applied primarily to the states, 13 states uniting under one federal
government. But why should that be
thought of as so difficult? These were
people who came basically from four neighboring countries in Europe, almost all
of them Protestant Christians of the same race.
Yet a more perfect union between these states, these people, was the
first thing on the minds of our Founders.
People talk about how our country is a country of
immigrants. For almost the first 350
years of our country’s existence, from the time of the first colonization
through the formal founding and almost 200 years later, our immigrants were
almost entirely from Europe, where they all had state churches. So they were essentially all of the same race
and religion.
But we also had a distinctly American culture, born of
Western Civilization yet unique among the nations of the world. We taught this culture in our schools, and
our nation was proud of it.
Our forefathers thought it was wise to bring in immigrants
only or at least predominantly from the same countries that settled our country
in the first place.
In 1965 the immigration policy of our country was changed, though
it was promised that it would not affect the existing demographics. In reality, immigration policy since 1965 has
favored any country but those from which our country was first populated.
Immigration is forever.
Whoever comes here either assimilates into our country or expects our
country to adapt to them. Our government
and schools no longer value or promote American culture, so assimilation is no
longer expected. Those who come here
will have children, and their numbers will only increase. So bringing in immigrants is far different
from aiding them where they are Essentially
we will be letting other nations change the nature of our nation, which is
exactly what we fought a war to end and what losing a war means.
For years now, our government and our schools have been
promoting multiculturalism and diversity.
Where our Founders stressed unity, our country is now encouraging
diversity.
They say diversity enriches us. But they don’t say it unites us. And that is what our government is supposed
to be concerned about. It is not the job
of the government to enrich us. It is up
to the people themselves if and how they want to be enriched. It is the job of the government to help us
unite with each other better.
Our forefathers sought future citizens from the same lands
that our past citizens came from. They
shared the same culture, religion, and values.
They wanted “a more perfect union.” It wasn’t even just a simple matter
of being united. It was supposed to be a “more perfect union.” Our Founders did not think it wise or
desirable to create a diverse nation
A diverse nation can only unite through its lowest common
denominators, meaning that there will be fewer and fewer things that actually
hold people together. And this only
comes when people’s differences are muted.
Instead of expressing one’s religion publicly, for example, you now have
to do it privately so as to not offend anyone of a different persuasion.
Bringing people into our country from very different
cultures without teaching or promoting our own values and culture will only
create many subcultures and societies within our borders with a union in name
only. We will no longer be simply Americans
but all kinds of hyphenated-Americans with no bonds to our neighbors. This is not a more perfect union.
The government wants to bring thousands of people into our
country when the country is deeply divided as to the wisdom of this move. Contrary to forming a more perfect union,
this is a bold attempt to divide the country.
It wants to spend billions of dollars, i.e. take billions of dollars
from everybody else or borrow this money and charge us the interest forever,
because they certainly have no intention of paying it back.
These billions of dollars will be used to support these
people for years. It will be used to try
to weed out any dangerous people, though it admits it can’t guarantee its
results. Oh, and we will spend billions
of dollars tracking over a million of them hoping to stop them if and before
they do something violent. This is not
effecting safety and happiness.
The government also seeks to silence any opposition to this
move. It has no concern whether any of
this will form a more perfect union. All
indications are that it will not, and that it is certain to cause divisions. The government’s idea of union here is to
squelch any sign of disapproval and think it has done its job.
It is a union created and enforced by government authority
and restrictions rather than by the people joining together united around an
ideal, much like Yugoslavia and Iraq, artificially created countries that were
held together by tyrants, but when the tyrants were removed, the countries
splintered apart, usually violently.
Establish justice
The idea of justice has changed recently in American judicial
policy and our public life. The
Declaration of Independence referred to “certain unalienable rights’ that
people were endowed with by their Creator, and it is the role of government to
secure these rights.
Justice was first concerned with protecting our rights, but
the very idea of what a right is has changed.
Originally rights were things that we could do, which the government
either couldn’t prohibit or diminish.
Now rights are increasingly defined as including things which people are
entitled to have, and it is the duty of the government to see that they get
them.
So establishing justice here is essentially assuring and
asserting that the people of the United States can enjoy and exercise their
God-given rights. The first such rights are given in the First Amendment:
Congress shall make
no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the
right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a
redress of grievances.
We are told and taught that our nation and all Western
nations are and were meant to be secular nations. Secularism is a worldview whose moral
framework consists of basically six principles: equality (new definition),
fairness, tolerance, diversity, relativism, and multiculturalism. In the absence of the Christian virtue and
command to love our neighbors, the directive is to tolerate our neighbors, best
exemplified by not giving offense to anyone.
But if our nation was intended to be a secular nation, the
First Amendment would not have protected the free exercise of religion, because
secularism would have values that would have superseded any religious
value. There would have been inevitable
conflicts, and religious freedom would have to be curtailed. The fact that there is a First Amendment protecting
the free exercise of religion shows that there was a consensus that religious
values and behavior were in the best interests of the country. That they had a particular religion in mind,
namely Christianity, is evident by the fact that the First Congress, the
Congress that passed the First Amendment, had Bibles published to be used in
all the public schools. They knew, as
John Adams said, that “our Constitution was made for only a moral and religious
people.”
A few years after this amendment was ratified, the United
States fought a war with a four Muslim countries in northern Africa. Our leaders could not understand why these
countries insisted on attacking our ships and enslaving our sailors. The Muslim leaders explained that this was
what Muslims do, and they showed them from the Quran why this was so.
When we say our Founders believed in the free exercise of
religion, it may well be possible that they had only the current religious situation
in the country at that time in mind. But
if they did indeed believe that this was a universal human right, they would
not have thought that immigration to our country was a human right, and they
would not have supported Muslim immigration, or at least mass immigration, because
their first concern was the welfare, safety, and happiness of the people they
fought a war to protect. The Barbary
Wars, as it was called, would have shown them the incompatibility of the Quran
and Islam with the American way of life.
The First Amendment, while highlighting the right of people
to exercise their religion, does not negate the fact that our Founders still
wanted Christian principles taught in our schools and guiding our public policy
nor would it mean that our government considered one religion as good as
another. Changing the demographics of
our country by increasing the Muslim population will cause a culture war that
will tear our country apart, as evidenced by the cultural conflicts all across
Europe today.
Another part of the First Amendment is to prohibit any
abridging of the freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech is entirely incompatible with Islam. People are regularly put to death in Muslim
countries for things they are even merely accused of saying if it is critical
of Islam, the Quran, or Muhammed. We are
already experiencing today restrictions on speech that would have been
intolerable to our Founders. Note too
that this freedom extended as well to the press.
insure domestic
Tranquility
Simply put, how are we to have domestic tranquility when we are
filling our country with people who are offended by many of the things we
already do here and that are a basic part of who we are. For example, Christmas is a national
holiday. It is the one day of the year
where essentially everything closes down.
Yet Christmas highly offends Muslims.
It is considered blasphemous to them.
Already we have school districts that want to ban holidays, because many
of their students don’t celebrate them, and they want to be inclusive. We are putting the interests of people newly
arrived in our country over that of those of our citizens.
But isn’t that the nice, kind thing to do? But if
we change our country to match the countries of all the people who come here,
then we no longer have our country. We
fought our War for Independence for nothing.
We threw off the English government so we could establish our own. But then we are supposed to give up our way
of life gradually to please everybody else who comes here?
People want to come here because of the society that we have
produced. If we change our society to be
like all the other nations, then we are no longer who we once were and no
longer have the reason for our existence.
Say all you want about tolerance, but if you have to try to
force people to accept a government policy, not only will you not succeed in
getting everybody to go along with it, you will always have to coerce many of
them, and many others will not embrace this cheerfully. Yet the Constitution is there to ensure our
domestic tranquility. And the
Declaration of Independence says that government should effect our happiness. And if it doesn’t, it needs to be
replaced. And that is exactly what our
current government is doing.
provide for the
common defense
Our federal government is now involved in many activities
which the Constitution does not say is its business. In fact, all activities not explicitly given
to the federal government in the Constitution were supposed to be left to the
states. But one of the clearly stated duties
of the federal government is to provide for the common defense.
We usually think of defense as protecting our country from
an invading army or fighting a war overseas for some vital interest of our
country. But when we are defending our
country, what is the enemy trying to do?
Kill people, yes. But why? Sometimes the goal is to exterminate a people,
like the Muslims in the Middle East want to do to Israel.
But usually one country or groups just wants to defeat
another country or group. They would
then change the government according to their liking. We fought our first war with England to change
the government that we had for one of our choosing.
So providing for the common defense isn’t just about warding
off an attacking army. It is about
protecting our government from changes that the people didn’t authorize; it is
about protecting the rights and freedoms of the people from those who would
take them from us.
Anything that disrupts a more perfect union, our government
is supposed to protect us from. Anything
that deprives us of justice, that is, that denies us or curtails our God-given
rights, our government is supposed to protect us from. Anything that endangers our domestic
tranquility and anything that diminishes our general welfare, our government
must be vigilant to protect us from.
And when our government fails to protect us from losing our
union, our justice, our tranquility, or our general welfare, we have the right,
no, the duty to throw off this government and demand a new one.
Right now the entire world is experiencing the threat of
Muslim terrorism, such that we can’t even board an airplane without having to take
off our shoes and undergo all manner of screenings to ensure that we are not
terrorists.
We are currently spending billions of dollars a year trying
to track over a million people on a terror watch list, which is almost uniformly
Muslim. We have far more Muslims coming
into our country than we are able to verify that they do not impose a danger to
our country.
Our government is willing to risk the safety, lives, and
general overall quality of life for all its people in order to not offend
people who either it is trying to bring into our country or who have already
come. Why is it doing this? Even confirmed peace-loving Muslims will have
children who are susceptible to the siren call of killing in the name of Allah. There is no other demographic of people in
the world with anywhere near this level of risk.
The government keeps trying to convince us that most Muslims
are nice, peace-loving people who fit in quite well in American society. Yet those of us who are older remember a much
more peaceful time in American life.
Even in the sixties, when we had riots on college campuses, nobody was
trying to kill everybody. There were a
few cases, but in general American life was safe. But these incidents did not change our whole
way of life.
Our country has changed.
It is no longer a safe place. We
had an entire federal department created for our security. The reasons can be summed up in one word:
Islam.
Yet our government keeps insisting that this is not the
problem, though the presence of Islam is the only relevant thing that has
changed. Our government is willing to
jeopardize if not sacrifice our security.
Why?
The world has become a much more dangerous place, and now
our own country is experiencing levels of danger that can only be attributed to
our government’s failure to provide a common defense.
promote the general
Welfare
The idea of government promoting the general welfare has had
two very different interpretations in American history, but there are two
common areas of agreement that will be helpful here.
The first is that the government is to be concerned for the
welfare of the people of the United States first. That sounds so obvious at first, yet in today’s
thinking, it can also sound selfish, intolerant, and uncompassionate.
A good illustration of this is the family. I have a wife and two kids, both grown. We raised and provided for our kids. That didn’t mean that we didn’t care about
all the other kids on the block, but we can only do so much, and frankly all
those other kids was none of our business.
If somebody had a serious problem, maybe the neighbors might help out,
but we couldn’t be responsible for what went on in other people’s homes. The same goes for countries and governments. Their first
responsibility is for their own people.
Immigration is a case in point. The government often, too often, is more
concerned for the general welfare of people who don’t live here than for the
people who do. And then when they do
come here, their welfare becomes more important than the welfare of everybody
else. There is little or no concern for
how particular immigrants or groups of immigrants will either contribute to or
at least not diminish the welfare of the people already here, and by them, of
course, I mean the citizens of the United States.
The mantra here is the word ‘immigrant.’ Any person not living here already is a
potential immigrant, and since we are a nation of immigrants, one is considered
as good as another. The mere fact that a
person is an immigrant automatically, we are assured, means that they will
contribute to the life and vitality of our country. No mention is made of the fact that immigrants
in the past had to meet certain standards, such as literacy, in order to be
accepted into our country. Sick people
were either turned back or held in quarantine until they were considered safe
to proceed. Anyone believed to require
public assistance was turned back. Now
it is assumed that they will need it.
So not only is a person’s ability to contribute to our
country not a factor in immigration today, but we are spending billions of
dollars a year to support people at a time when our country’s debt has never
been higher. To put it another way, we
are borrowing money we will never pay back to support people who are coming
into our country. The interest on this
debt that we will be paying forever reduces the standard of living for
everybody by contributing to inflation and higher taxes.
But isn’t it selfish for the United States government to
focus on the needs and welfare of the American people when they have it so
well, and the rest of the world lives at a so much lower standard of living? Should we not be sharing the wealth?
That is not for the American government to decide. The American government is supposed to take
care of the American people, i.e. its citizens, period. The American people have always been a
generous people, but that is not the role of the government. If I want to give my money to help out
somebody else, fine. But it is wrong for
the government to take my money and give it to whoever it chooses.
The better question is: why can’t other countries do what we
did to become rich? Some will say that
we became rich by exploiting the other countries. That, of course, relieves those countries of any
responsibility to change anything, but most Americans don’t believe that anyway.
The other principle about promoting the general welfare that
is common to the two different views is that the general welfare is something
that applies to everybody, not just to some.
For example, the Affordable Care Act would be unconstitutional under
this provision in that the government is raising money (taxes) to give to only certain
people to pay for their medical insurance.
This is not a broad general program that benefits everybody. You can be sure that the political party that
passed this legislation will have loyal voters for as long as this program is
in effect. Meaning that any political
party that wants to repeal this act will find a lot of people automatically
opposed to their efforts.
The act of the federal government raising money (taxes) to
pay for the support of immigrants is not promoting the general welfare. It is putting the welfare of a select group
of people, people not even a part of our country, over the welfare of everyone
who is. In the past, the goal of immigration
was to bring in people who would make a contribution to our country, or at
least not be a burden or detriment to it.
Our immigration policy now is almost entirely for the benefit of those
the government wants to bring here.
secure the Blessings
of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity
It might be helpful here to quote the definition of blessing
from Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828),
which will give us a better sense of what this meant at the time this was
written:
3. Any means of happiness; a gift, benefit
or advantage; that which promotes temporal prosperity and welfare, or secures
immortal felicity. A just and pious magistrate is a public blessing. The divine favor is the greatest blessing.
Notice
that it is liberty that brings the blessings, the temporal prosperity and
welfare. It is not the role of government
to provide the blessings. It is not the
role of government to provide housing and food and medical insurance for
people. Government has no money but what
it takes from people.
But
notice here that the policies that government follows are not just to promote
the welfare of the American citizens living now but to future generations as
well.
One
example of how our governments, local, state, and federal, act
unconstitutionally here is by their policy of borrowing money for their daily
business. Our government usually would borrow
money to fight a war, but to borrow money just to fund the day-to-day
operations of government robs from future generations. Nobody in government talks about actually
paying off this debt, but our children will be paying the interest on this debt
forever.
With
regard to immigration, we must remember that immigration is forever. Those who come here will have children and
grandchildren who will impact our country in many ways. Before we embraced multiculturalism,
immigrants were expected to assimilate to us.
Now we will have separate Muslim communities forming around the country
to which we will have to accommodate our way of life for theirs. The country that we are leaving to our
children will be very different from the one we had and the one our Founders
intended for us.
So,
in summary, bringing Muslims into our country will divide us rather than unite
us. It will diminish justice by diminishing
free expression of religion (as in Christian religion) and the press. It will destroy domestic tranquility rather
than ensure it. It will permeate our
country with the very things our government is supposed to defend us from. It will undermine the general welfare. It will jeopardize the securing of the
blessings of liberty to our children.
And it will outright eliminate our safety and happiness as a nation.
As
of right now, Donald Trump is the only person running for President who sees
that there is a problem with Muslim immigration in itself.
