The original progressive (communist) president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, in 1911, started what is now a behemoth, a leviathan of  public (government employment)-sector bureaucracies.  These bureaucracies have proliferated exponentially over the 115 years of their existence.  

Franz Kafka and C.S. Lewis both wrote about a similar dystopia in 1930s Germany, just as Hitler was taking control of that nation, first with bureaucracy and then murder.  The Marxists/Stalinists dispense with gradual bureaucratic takeover and murdered millions using the USSR’s military and police force.  

Regardless of how they assume control (regulatory bureaucracy, administrative state, or force of arms), there is one common denominator: control of the private sector, the citizen, the individual, through a central government.

This is the source of the general malaise we citizens feel today.  Mutual respect and common goals are replaced with hate, anger, violence, destruction.  It doesn’t make sense to decent people, unless we postulate an intent behind this vast disruption of everything we hold dear.

Our family, friends, and neighborhood; our religion and our nation, the very idea of America, Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, is being torn apart, with intent and malaise aforethought.  

However, evil can’t live in the light of intelligent curiosity, awareness, and knowledge.  In opposition to our adversaries, who concocted a lie in the dark to subjugate us, we can remember and rediscover the truth behind our nation’s founding.  We can know the principles upon which this nation was founded, and in the pure light of that knowledge and those principles, we can drive back the evil malaise that infests our nation.  

We do by living according to the principles of our Constitution, which controls the government, and the inalienable rights noted in the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes that the individual was created by an entity greater than any man or government.  

Then we go to work on the politicians and bureaucrats that make up the government.  We hold them accountable at every step of the way.  We tell them: no more lies, no more platitudes, reduce the size and power of the administrative state or lose your elected position.  

If we individuals want to live in freedom and liberty, then we must take control of our destiny, as our Founding Fathers intended.  We have it easy; they gave us the Constitution.  All we have to do is remember its meaning, embrace its principles, and apply them.

Our nation is not its government.  In fact, the government is a necessary evil.  It’s not a means to an end, unless that end is control.  The intent of our nation’s founding is a constitutional republic.  The Constitution is the law of the land, based on bedrock principles that transcend human foolishness.  Our Constitution controls the federal, state, and local governments. 

A republic is rule by the people.  It is not democracy, which devolves into rule of the majority over the minority, or tyranny of the many over the few.  A republic is self-governance by each and every individual citizen in adherence to the law of the land.  It’s not anarchy as long as the individual understands, deeply, the principle of freedom and responsibility, especially the sanctity of the individual. 

We can complain and do nothing, in which case we will have failed future generations, or we study, understand, and live by the principles that recognize our individual freedom.  Time to choose.

Jay Davidson is founder and CEO of a commercial bank.  He is a student of the Austrian School of Economics and a dedicated capitalist.  He believes there is a direct connection joining individual right and responsibility, our Constitution, capitalism, and the intent of our Creator.

Image: JSMed via Pixabay, Pixabay License.