Home Forums Miscellaneous Topics Second Amendment Voting Libertarian

Aw, stop. You made me have to check my pulse: generally folks don't say stuff that nice about a guy until after he's dead.

I'm not used to having people agree with even most of what I say, let alone all of it. Standard fare for me is when some sawed-off little Irish son-of-a-gun says to a third party, "You know, I'm no longer convinced that Barak is quite as full of s**t as I thought he was before."

I'm joking, of course (at least a little bit), but seriously...if there are already real liberty advocates operating here, with their heads on reasonably straight, it might be best for me to go off and find someplace else where there aren't. Bellyaching libertarians are most effective when they're not just bellyaching to each other.

(Incidentally, have you seen www.youdebate.com? I haven't managed to decide yet whether that place is a completely lost cause or not--especially that little junior-high-school girl named Exxoss who seems to have all the time in the world to do nothing but log on and croon "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing.")

Barak - Alright, I going to say it again, I really do agree with almost everything you are saying, I suppose the main difference is how we approache what we perceive to be reality.

I do believe the philosophy behind democrats is evil. Democrats may believe that "it is such a small price to pay" and pehaps, left at that, it wouldn't be evil. But increasingly today they go on the say "it is such a small price to pay and if you don't agree with me, then you are evil and must be destroyed". Right now they accomplish this destruction with insane rhetoric and hyperbole designed to destroy someone's reputation and marganalize them in our society. Can more destructive methods be far away? It is afterall, only a matter of degree.

I believe we are closer to the ultimate tyranny than you do. I don't think there would be any riots, battles between national guardsmen and soldiers, etc.. I think our government is much more subtle than that. Frankly, upon reflection, they may never try to take our guns. They may never try to make us stop talking. The ultimate trick would be to let us squawk forever and to do nothing. They could steadily increase "real tyranny" with taxes, control over all aspects of our lives, and abrogation of private property while we all merrily chatted away about our rights. In fact, it would be far more dangerous to try and shut us up as that might awaken a few people and endanger the government. I don't believe there is any conscience conspiracy but rather philosophys that are morally bankrupt and evil which will lead to subjegation.

As to my preference for my thugs, well, you have a point. However, I will try to explain it by saying that I don't believe enough people in America realize what is going on, or care enough to do anything about it. I feel as though I am a perceptive cow in a herd grazing contentedly in the pasture. I know we are all headed for the slaughter house eventually, but none of the others seem to know. If I tried to lead them to freedom they wouldn't follow because they don't understand. Most of them, even if they understand don't care enough to make a run for it. The current farmer sends some of us to the stockyards every so often. He doesn't send me because he thinks I am an especially fine cow and he likes the look of me. But, if I make trouble, he will send me off quick as you please. What to do? Make a mad dash for freedom and hasten my own end. Or, continue to graze and hope that one day when the farmer is working cows or walking in the field I can kick him in the head and kill him when he isn't expecting it even though, I know this is a remote possibility and that he will likely be replaced with another farmer.

So I guess my point is that I don't have faith that there are any people in this country who would do what is necessary (at least not in my lifetime). I would rather graze contentedly for as long as possible (even though the grass is getting bitter) than make a mad dash and become a hopeless cow martyr.

Like you mentioned in another thread, we can be ready for what happens to us, but what about our children and grandchildren. Do we even have the right to decide what we think the best lifestyle is for them? Weighty questions. I would like to see some action, but I will not be a Watt Tyler and have my head displayed over London Bridge for nothing. Call me a coward if you will, but I am not ready for that yet.

Barak, on the post in question, what could I disagree with? That's not to say that I always agree with you, though I usually do. Occasionally you say things I disagree with. For example you seem to be under the misapprehension that if the general militia were to ever be opposed by the United States Armed Forces the majority of the population would be on the side of the Militia and would demand that the our rights be restored. I cannot imagine this ever happening, because the vast majory of the American people are ill-informed sheep, who only want peace and order and goodies, even at the expense of liberty. This is especially true with the liberal-controlled media telling them what to think of the "terrorist groups" (read, patriotic American Militia-men) who are causing so much trouble that the Feds had to call in the military to deal with them. Of course "all the trouble" refers to armed Americans in organized resistance of arms confiscations. Shades of Lexington and Concord, no. But it won't be reported as another Lexington and Concord, that I guarantee. It will be the military against the bad guys and trouble makers. It is really, I believe, a lost cause, and that is another area where you and I disagree.

I read something this morning by Thomas Friedman on an unrelated subject that put me in mind of this discussion. He used an old Indian saying:

"If we don't turn around now, we just may get where we're going."

I do get tired of close elections where a Republican's loss is blamed on Libertarians or other alternative parties.

The blame should lie with those that continue to vote for a party that pays lip service to liberty and sells us out at every corner for political expediency.
The blame lies squarely with those that vote for unprincipled republicans as a delaying tactic and then advise the rest of us to not vote our principles or conscience.

The blame also rests on the republican party for abandoning republican principles of liberty and freedom and replacing them with a game of my socialist programs are better than the democrats socialist programs.


red

If I may be allowed to join in:
I agree with the Libertarian philosophy, but as I have stated in other posts; It's the ineptitude of the Libertarian Party that gives me pause. They seem to be nothing more than children who want to play with the big boys but don't have the muscle or size to compete effectively. They go after the Presidency or the Senate when they should be concentrating on city councils and state and local races. Why spend the majority of funds on races you can't win (So that H. Brown & Co. can go to parties and rub elbows with the big time pols?) when there are plenty of races that you CAN win? Like it or not, the body public isn't going to wake up one day and say, "Holy Crap! What was I thinking? I should be voting Libertarian!" The Libertarians have no track record, indeed it seems that they don't really WANT to win (after all, winning would require them to produce something besides rhetoric). I also dislike the arrogance in which those Party Members deal with the 'great unwashed'. Any suggestion that you make, that they disagree with, are met with disdain if not outright scorn.
I am weary of voting AGAINST something in every election. How I would love to vote FOR something. Until the Libertaians grow up and decide to make a serious attempt at gaining office, I cannot abide their tactics of being spoilers for the Republicans. Thus far, it seems that instead of furthering the cause of Liberty, all that they have served to do is to speed us along the road to tyranny.
For myself, I am looking into The Constitution Party. Perhaps they might be reasoned with.

I have ZERO respect for anyone whom fears Bush and the US government (which has NEVER targeted inocent United States civilians in 227 years) more than ragheaded terrorists.

It's okay! I'm a libertarian: I don't mind if you don't agree with everything I say. (Of course, if you don't, I'll continue to harangue you, most probably, but that's okay: it's just persuasion, not coercion.) <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smirk.gif" alt="" />


Something somebody said at work a few years ago really caught my attention. A coworker of mine had just recommended that I go around the corner and talk to some guys whom I probably never would have met professionally, because my coworker happened to know that both I and they were gun nuts.

So I went over and introduced myself. One of them said, "I'm Stan, and this is Carl and Jon. We try to take a trip to the range over lunch at least once every couple of weeks, and we'd love to have you join us. This guy over here is Phil, but he's a Canadian and hasn't yet been able to shake his socialist upbringing, so he doesn't come out with us because he doesn't approve."

Suddenly Jon interjected, "But nobody cares what Phil thinks, because he doesn't have any guns."

Hmm, I thought. The conversation went on in a similar lighthearted vein and turned out to be productive, but I kept coming back to that comment: "Nobody cares what Phil thinks, because he doesn't have any guns."

I think that if push comes to shove in this country, what the antigunners think isn't going to matter all that much, because the progunners will be the ones with all the guns.


I'm not particularly concerned about this happening. For one thing, the liberty movement is growing. I mean, look at us: here on 24HourCampfire, we're talking about liberty and voting for a libertarian third party, and it's not even an election year! When's the last time that happened? Talk is powerful, which is why the freedom of speech was considered important enough to guarantee in the very first article of the Bill of Rights.

Furthermore, if you've never read anything by Claire Wolfe, I would highly recommend that you do. (You don't have to spend any money until after you get hooked on her: much of her work is available on the Internet.) One point that she makes over and over again is that freedom cannot be taken; it must be surrendered. You're as free as you decide to be, regardless of what the government says. If you regard the government as an ultimate authority and are careful and persnickety about doing everything it tells you to do, then you're not very free. But if you regard the government as merely an inconvenience to be worked around (and perhaps in some cases alleviated), then you'll find that you can be quite free--perhaps freer than you can now imagine.


And I believe you're right. But I also think that both history and the government is on our side. If the government was smart, it would stop growing right before the oppression became great enough to drive the wrong percentage of the people into a killing rage. But I don't think it's capable of stopping. Politicians seem to think that simply because they managed to take the last three liberties away safely, that means they can also take away the next three liberties safely. Sooner or later, that line of reasoning will fail, and we'll rise up and take them all back.

You don't have to be a carefully groomed libertarian by L Neil Smith's definition, and have the correct version of the Non-Aggression Principle thoroughly memorized, to recognize when injustice is being perpetrated against you and to rebel against it. Regardless of the fate of the liberty movement, I think the rebellion is coming.

The potential problem, of course, is that people who are murderously angry but who have no real understanding of liberty are liable to think, "These folks have finally screwed with me long enough: now that I have the power, I'm going to screw with them, and their children, and their children's children, and make sure my kids will do the same thing when I'm gone." A revolution by people like that will of course lead to a government that is just as oppressive--probably even more so--as the one it replaced. Therefore, it is our duty as libertarians not only to give the people at large a common target for their frustrations (not Democrats, or Republicans, or Big Corporations, or Big Labor, or [insert appropriate ethnic slur here], but the State!), but to educate them concerning the blessings of liberty, as opposed to the tyranny of "my thugs in charge." First, a revolution that pursues liberty, rather than "my thugs in charge," is likely to result in more freedom, not less. Secondly, it's likely to happen sooner and less violently.


I'll grant your point, but I'll also assert that it doesn't absolve you of responsibility. You have to do more than just keep grazing.

At some point, government oppression will reach the point where people are willing to rebel. We as libertarians, I'm afraid, can have only a minor effect on how far in the future that point is: it may well be long after our grandchildren are dead, if the American people turn out to be as cowardly as some folks seem to think they are.

But when that time comes, it is absolutely vital that at least some of those people understand exactly what they should be fighting for, and how to achieve it once they've won, lest rivers of blood be spent on just another tyranny. By that time, the government schools may well not be teaching about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson anymore, and no one may have heard of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution for a generation or two--at least, not from official sources. Guns may have long since been banned and confiscated, and perhaps even the knowledge of how to operate a gun might get you imprisoned unless you're an official government thug.

Therefore, the two overriding responsibilities of libertarians during this time are as follows:

First, we must teach. We must teach anyone who will listen, most importantly our young people, not only that liberty is preferable to safety, but why it is. We must paint glowing pictures of personal responsibility, private property, and tax freedom. We must not only explain our philosophy, but we must be able to refute the standard government arguments and demonstrate why it is superior to socialism. We must inoculate our children with the intelligence and resourcefulness to be able to do the same with the government arguments that will be standard when they are able to argue.

Secondly, we must obtain firearms and ammunition while we still can, and preserve them against the coming government confiscation for the generation that will finally do the rebelling. They don't have to be wonderguns; in my case they're simple forty-dollar bolt-action Yugoslavian Mauser 1898s in 8mm, with 700rd of cheap corrosive ammunition per gun and extensive instructions aimed at someone who has never been in the same room with a firearm before, written in three languages on acid-free paper and carefully preserved. Not the state of the art, to be sure, but enough to A) learn the basics of shooting and develop a rudimentary skill at it, and B) use those basics and rudiments to obtain a copy of whatever the government is issuing to its thugs at that point.
Until after the confiscations, I think this is about all we can do. Once the confiscations are over, our responsibilities will be slightly different.


Absolutely! Not only the right, but also the duty and responsibility. What else are parents for?


I'll tell you what to look for.

Remember the Washington sniper? Look for something like that to happen again, except that the sniper is shooting only politicians or bureaucrats. (Maybe just one, maybe several in a row.) Maybe he won't be a sniper--maybe his MO will be something else. Anyway, when you see him, look at the way the people react to him. Are they screaming for the government to protect them? Are they clamoring for more laws and more restrictions? If they are, then it's not time yet.

But if the media is screaming for more laws and restrictions, but there's a muted rumble of sympathy from the people; if you get the feeling that this guy could knock on a door at random and be subsequently gratefully eating a bowl of hot soup served up by the woman of the house while the man of the house is at the front door looking at a photo proffered by the FBI and saying, "No, I'm sorry, I haven't seen him;" if you see that, then the time to act is very rapidly approaching. If you're not equipped and organized already by that time with other serious liberty advocates around you, you'd bloody well better get equipped and organized, because something's about to happen and you want to be part of it.

Careful with those imaginings about what could ever happen: ever might be a long, long time. I agree with you that if it were to happen now, the people would not side with the militia. However, answer me this: is it happening now? No. Why? Because the people wouldn't side with the militia, and the militia has enough brains to understand that.

One of these days, though, the people may change their minds. Not enough to grab a rifle and start shooting up a supply convoy, perhaps, but at least enough to somehow not get around to calling the authorities when they see a neighbor dressed in camouflage carrying a long, suspicious-looking package in the back door of his house at night.


I'm not sure "disagree" is exactly the right word. It may indeed be a lost cause, at least in our lifetimes. But I'm just not really constitutionally cut out for that kind of pessimism, because it leads to the conclusion, "There's nothing to be done." And if I accept that conclusion and it turns out that I'm wrong, I look like a coward. If I decide the situation is not hopeless when it actually is, however, then at least when all is said and done I'll be able to tell myself that I did something. At least I tried, etc.

But to each his own.

Tee, you say the Federal Government has never targeted innocent civilians. Ever hear of Waco or Ruby Ridge? The BATF and similar paramilitary agencies are constantly battering doors down in the middle of the night with blank warrents, to be filled in later. So does the IRS. Innocent people get killed when masked soldiers of the Federal Government smash doors in with submachineguns in hand and pushing people to the floor, and shooting people who make fast moves, who are not used to being treated like this. Pregnant women lose their unborn children when they are kicked by federal agents who received a false report that there are illegal guns in that house, or whatever. This stuff happens all the time, and it's only going to get worse, but is rarely if ever reported on in the news.

Well, I'm just a libertarian, not a Libertarian, so I won't presume to defend the political strategy of the Libertarian Party.

But there is this: the thing that finally persuaded me to check out the claims of libertarians was an interview I heard on local talk radio with Harry Browne. They were interviewing him because he was running for President, and a Presidential candidate, no matter how minor, was a pretty big catch for a local radio talk host. If he'd been running only for city council or state legislature, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have bothered with him.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that "Libertarian Party" is something of a contradiction in terms. Libertarians by their nature agree on very, very little. What they do agree on is critically important, of course, but it isn't much. It shouldn't really be enough to build a political party on, and the wonder is not that the Libertarian Party hasn't won any elections, but that it's been able to continue to exist at all.

One of the reasons they don't have a strategy for winning is probably because they know as well as you and I do that they're not going to win. The purpose of a third party in a two-party system is not to win anyway: what third parties do is simply to provide a platform to attract votes away from the two major parties. When a major party loses, it can then look at the platforms and vote counts of the third parties and adjust its own platform to grab those votes the next time. (Major parties that win, of course, don't give a fig about what anyone thinks, and they generally don't even pretend to until the next election.)
The Libertarian Party doesn't say, "Vote for us, and we'll give you a libertarian President." Rather, they say (to people like you), "Are you a disgruntled Republican? Is your party ignoring you? Are you sick of it? Sick enough to take drastic action? Then vote for us, and we'll do our level best to make the Republicans lose and force them to listen to you."

Even the long-range hopes of most libertarians don't include a President from the Libertarian Party. They involve a libertarian Republican (or possibly Democrat!) President, an essentially dead Libertarian Party, and a major party that is scared to death to even breathe an anti-libertarian word, lest the Libertarian Party spring vengefully back to life and eat their lunch in the next election. (In such an environment, of course, the out-of-power major party would have to make libertarian overtures as well, if it wanted to have a chance of winning.)

The Libertarian Party (and all third parties, actually) are like bars of soap: once they serve their purpose, they're gone.

This is assuming, of course, that the Republican leadership manages sometime in the future to achieve a double-digit IQ and leave behind the bloodcurdling stupidity it has been displaying in the past. If it doesn't, then I suppose it's possible that we could have a series of Democrat victories while the Republican Party shrinks and the Libertarian Party grows, until finally the L's replace the R's. For everyone's sake, though, I hope that doesn't happen.

Gee, I guess I did end up defending the Libertarian Party's political strategy. Sorry... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smirk.gif" alt="" />

Go from us in peace, then, and may your chains hang lightly on you.

Barak - One thing that frightens me is that I think in the near future, armed resistance will become an impossibility. I think firearms are going to become obselete and irrelevant. A recent article in one of the gun magazines talked about the plethora of "non-lethal" devices being developed by the police and military. I really wonder what business the military has developing non-lethal weapons and who they intend to use them against? One device that I remember from the article was a sort of microwave that would heat any metal in contact with skin to the point that it could not be held. It has an effective range of 2 klicks. The military is also known to be far down the road to developing lethal microwave devices that can only be described as "death-rays". With one pass of a helicopter an area several klicks sqare could be denuded of all life.

In truth, the non-lethal devices scare me more because their use could easily be justified against various "criminals" and for crowd control. Imagine how effective it would be to have a device that caused everyone within two miles to have to drop their pants because the zipper was suddenly red hot. I have always argued that a gun represented the ultimate freedom. With a gun, no one could make a man do something he didn't want to do. A man with a gun can always kill himself or make someone else kill him before he goes anywhere. Therefore, the gun reprents the ultimate snub at authority. However, I believe in the future this will not be the case and guns will be easily disabled or their owners will be rendered incapable of using them by these remote non-lethal devices. This new law requiring all guns sold in Maryland to have the smart gun technology as soon as it operable is an example. How long do you think it will be before police have a "master-key" remote control allowing them to turn off any smart weapon? How long do you think it will be after an officer is shot with an old fashioned weapon that the clamor for removing all the "dumb" weapons will begin? Afterall, they would argue that they weren't prohibiting anyone from owning a gun, it just would have to be a certain type.

Firearms have been the dominant force on the battlefield and everywhere else since the late 16th century. They have reigned supreme for about 450 years, even though they were around before that. Before firearms, the dominant force was the English longbow. The longbow dominated for about the same length of time and I am sure that no English archer at Crecy or Agincourt ever dreamed that he would be supplanted by those noisy, smelly, and cumbersome "handgons" and cannon.

The average public will never be allowed the access to these new weapons that it had to firearms and bows and within the next twenty-five to fifty years the firearms will be as out of place as an English longbow would be on today's battlefield.

Gee--how can you live with all that pessimism?! I think that if I really thought life was as hopeless as it seems that you do, I would have eaten the barrel of one of my guns a long time ago.

First, don't let all the things you can imagine going wrong with each course of action prevent you from taking any course of action; if you do that, you're taken out of the game without a fight. Maybe you're right and it'll only cost them a single trigger-pull to get rid of you: but at least make it cost them that.

Second, you seem to be talking about pretty standard infantry warfare, between militia armed with AR-15 poodle-shooters on one side against a huge mechanized government swarm with all sorts of science-fiction kill-um juju.

I think that there are a couple of things you're missing, but I'm not sure I can describe them succinctly. Perhaps I can describe them (like everything else) at great length.

No government can support itself, because governments don't produce anything: they must always tax and confiscate and fine the resources they need. Any parasite dies without a host: government must have a productive class to support it. The productive class must be much, much larger than the government, otherwise it will not be able to support the government: a parasite that kills its host dies as well. Once the government has reached the point where further growth will kill its host, the only way it can continue to grow is by increasing the size or the productivity of the host.

Either way, the people will always be more powerful and more productive than the government, no matter how many whizbang weapons the government has. Part of that power comes from the fact that if the government gets too oppressive, the productive class can merely stop producing any more than they need to maintain themselves at subsistence level. (Read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, if you have the patience for it.) What's the government going to do--buy a bunch of guns and hire guards to hold them on producers to force the production to continue? Where will it get the money for the guns? How will it pay the guards? What about the fact that every additional guard hired means one less producer? What about the fact that in such a case every self-respecting producer would begin producing only barely enough not to get shot, rather than the full capacity he'd be producing if he were getting the fruit of his labor? It just won't work: the government would collapse.

So the government can't ever be watching all the people all the time, and savvy militia members will figure out how to arrange to be in the group that's not being watched. And instead of forming up into ranks and marching out to meet the government in battle, they'll do exactly what they did in the last Revolutionary War: they'll sabotage and assassinate and monkeywrench in secret. Some of them will be found, but many won't.

And no, the government can't go around exterminating entire towns because they're suspected of harboring militia. That works when you're an invading army being supported from outside, but when you're depending on people to produce what you need to live, it's counterproductive to kill off those people in large numbers; and if the people are already honked off enough to form a big enough militia to cause you trouble, behavior like that is just going to convince more of them that they have nothing to lose.

Very good sir! The .gov only gets away with what we let it, thats why the schools are now training grounds rather than beacons of education. Back to the old "Let eat bread and watch circus's" or something near that.

Well, Barak, I'm not really all that pessimistic. Oh, I always see potential problems, but that is more by training. As a Christian, I believe that most of this is irrelevant in the end. Some would argue (maybe you?) that religion and particularly Christianity, has been instrumental in keeping the masses down by convincing them that their reward would be in heaven no matter how bad things were here. I disagree and believe that it is somewhat more than a coincidence that the greatest flowering of freedom and free thought has occurred in the last 500 years, roughly corresponding to the Protestant Reformation.

In any case, you make valid points in your response about productivity and the government being a parasite. However, I believe that feudalism or systems akin to it are the natural state of man once he bands together in groups larger than roving bands of hunters and gatherers. On every continent, in every age feudalism has tended to develop. I believe that the last 200 years or so has been an aberration and not the natural state of men or government.

In medieval Europe feudalism lasted for roughly one thousand years. It featured a small landed class who controlled the technology of war who subsisted off the efforts of subservient classes. Only the noble could afford this technology because it was so expensive. Arms were also mostly prohibited to the lower classes in many cases. I see the possibility of the technology of war being harnessed again by the elites (governments) for holding the lower orders in thrall.

There were no massive peasant uprisings or work stoppages that caused the downfall of feudalism. No instead it was a combination of the Black Death in 1347 and the subsequent pandemics lasting for three more centuries which drastically lowered the population and created labor and market forces unknown befeore, firearms and their ease in use by everyone, and religous reform which brought on the Renaissance and eventually the Age of Reason which spawned our ideas of governance and rights. Except in the most isolated of instances, people have never demonstrated the desire to throw off the yoke of the state by either violence or passive resistance. And, in the cases where they have, the cure is often worse than the cold (France 1792). In the Middle Ages if people decided that they were only going to produce enough to maintain at the subsistance level, the lord took his share anyway and they starved. While this may have deprived the lord of some his tenants and lessened his wealth to a degree, the surviving tenants soon learned that they must produce subsistence plus the lord's share. Peasants did not revolt often becasue for one, they were at a subsistence level and did not have time to worry about such things. And, if they did revolt, they were killed rather promptly (see Watt Tyler). Actually, when the changes did come, it was the elites themselves who made a lot of the initial changes. In fact, the life of a common person in the early 19th century differed very little from one in the 14th.

No, while I see your explanations and understand the reasoning behind them, I think that one should never underestimate the power of brute force. It has always worked and it always will. While I have read Ayn Rand and see the seductive logic to her arguments, governments have always found ways to squeeze wealth out of their subjects. Oh sure, nothing goes on forever and all governments or systems come to an end, but they can last for a very long time. Oh yes, governments will kill off large amounts of people even if it deprives them of revenue, they have always done it. It sets a cruel example and allows them to exploit the remaining people for more. And anyway, most of the time they don't have to kill many to get the rest to fall in line.

In essence I believe we are headed down and it is unstoppable. I believe once we get down, we will be down for a long, long time. I believe this is a worldwide phenomenon and not limited to this country. That is why I feel it is important to delay because once we get there, we won't be coming back anytime soon. Out of the 12 billion or so people who have ever existed, at least 10 billion of them existed in servitude and never knew any difference. So it will be this time as well.

Yes, Libertarian is correct. The causes of liberty in our nation were rather unique in human history. We were a group of colonies whose population had grown accustomed to being unharassed by government, and living under self-rule, where general liberty was the norm. Only after a century of the population becoming thoroughly accustomed to liberty did the British government attempt to reign all that in, so as to increase the financial benefit to the crown. It was only this people, colonial Americans, who felt this tightening control as an outrage such that risking death in war seemed less outragious to them.

Today's Americans are not occustomed to liberty, as this (their birth-right) has been stolen from them little by little, generation after generation, so they will not feel the harness of the government, as it transforms them more and more into slaves of the state. We no longer have the conditions necessary for throwing off a government. Sad, but true. Wish it wasn't true, but I think it is. So few people even understand, let alone love, liberty enough to risk their lives and fortunes to regain something they never even knew. Most people today have been conditioned in government schools to believe that liberty means only that you are free to vote for your slave masters every two to six years.

You have to know liberty to want to fight for its restoration. Only few of us understand what it means to be free, and hate the alternative enough to fight, if pushed far enough. The difference between us and the early citizens of this nation is that were they to take a trip to our time, they'd immediately pick up arms and throw every agent of the Federal Government out of their respective states. That's because they would immediately feel the cold hand of tyranny on their necks, and would react like free men should when slavery is forced upon them. The reason we do not act this way is that we are no longer a free people. Tyranny is the norm for us (has been for almost a century), so a little more tyranny every year doesn't seem so horrible to most of us.

I think Barak would be surprised to discover just how much tyranny most Americans can me conditioned to accept, so long as the doses are small and gradual enough, and we have enough to eat, shelter and clothes sufficient to keep us warm, and "free" medicine (not to mention the best 24 hours of TV programming and video games ever). This is especially so because children are no longer tuaght what it means to be free. It is only few of us who have studied liberty, undestand it, and have learned to love it enough to want to preserve it at any cost.

Hawkeye good points. As a group, we may not ever agree on much except our love of liberty and freedom. The colonies argued for 14 years(?) over our Constitution before it was accepted and even then there were people that walked out and didn't sign. I think it may have been (Rhode Island?) that didn't even show up. If it wasn't Rhode Island one of our more learned members will correct me <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />. I can't remember for sure.

The same debates continue today.

red