John Kerry: Freedom Makes It Hard to Govern
Speaking before a group of State Department workers last week, Secretary of State John Kerry gave voice to the frustration authoritarians experience because of the easy access to information on the internet. Secretary Kerry told the audience that the world had been "complicated" by "... this little thing called the internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year."
This pesky internet, Kerry says, "makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest." This is a great source of aggravation for our political masters, who, for nearly all of the 20th century, were able to limit and control the information available to their subjects. This is why government efforts to control the internet are on the rise and will continue to increase in intensity and frequency; an informed public is just too darned hard to "organize" and to dictate a "common interest" to.
Authoritarians like Kerry don't even realize how revealing such comments are. They actually believe in their personal infallibility and the inherent goodness of the monstrous governmental beast they have created in Washington and state capitols across the country. They know with absolute certitude that if they only had, as Congressman Barney Frank asked for in 2010, "more authority and more ability," they could fix everything.
What Kerry and the rest of the reigning Republicrat authoritarians fail to realize -- or simply reject outright -- is that the only "common interest" of Americans should be freedom. Not health care, global warming, food stamps, Social Security, student loans, or perpetual war. It's hard to maintain control over every facet of citizens' lives when the internet allows exposure of crimes like the NSA's domestic spying or the spread of ideas about human liberty. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie recently referred to such ideas about freedom as "dangerous thought" -- these being the same ideas espoused by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington that King George III sent an army to crush two centuries ago.
The ruling Republicrat cartel has fully embraced the poisonous sentiment, first popularized by Woodrow Wilson, that government is the "indispensible and beneficent organ of society." Every progressive who has followed Wilson expressly rejects the truth, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, that governments are but a necessary evil, established among men to safeguard their God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As far back as 1837, Daniel Webster recognized the character of such men when he said:
There are men, in all ages, who mean to exercise power usefully; but they mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters. They think there need be but little restraint upon themselves. Their notion of the public interest is apt to be quite closely connected with their own exercise of authority. They may not, indeed, always understand their own motives. The love of power may sink too deep in their own hearts even for their own scrutiny, and may pass with themselves for mere patriotism and benevolence.
It is the arrogance and naiveté of these authoritarian Republicrats that has resulted in the undoing of the American Revolution and led us into this downward spiral of debt, unemployment, and tyranny. The internet does indeed make it hard to govern the way they want -- that is why it is severely restricted in places like North Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia. The entire Constitution was written to make it hard for authoritarians to govern; it contains rules and separates power among three different branches, as well as the Bill of Rights, meant to protect Americans from Kerry and his ilk, who would prefer that freedom didn't get in the way of their plans for a better world.
Two centuries ago, Patrick Henry told his fellow Virginians, "You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured; for liberty ought to be the direct end of your government." Our political overseers have already successfully swept the constitution aside, and largely convinced the public to reject the American Revolution and embrace the Wilsonian notion of an "indispensible and beneficent" (and all-powerful) government. Let us hope that the internet and the free flow of ideas about freedom continue to hamper the planners and world-savers who intend to remake the world in their image and reduce us all under absolute tyranny.
Todd Konrad is a former Navy intelligence specialist attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency and the author of the upcoming book A Republic, if you can keep it: a chronicle of the American Counterrevolution.