Editorial: What is a right?
Citizens are constantly arguing that they and other citizens have or should have a right to certain privileges merely due to their citizenship. Perhaps it is because of the success experienced by this nation as a whole and we have not had to worry about other things. Perhaps this is because we have been protected by two oceans that left our land and our factories relatively unharmed by foreign wars. Regardless, the culture has gravitated toward a sense of entitlement in which many people have begun to think that they have a right to food, to shelter, to healthcare, to other needs of life by merely because they live in America.
A right must be understood to be God given. No one person can be thought to possess a right when it is gained through the sacrifice of another. We have the right to personal safety, to speak freely, to breathe, and to dance on the lawn until midnight until it begins to impact on the rights of others. It has often been said that you have the right to swing your arm freely but only up that point when your fist comes within an inch of someone else’s nose, because that someone else also has the right to safety in his own person.
Thus if a right is God-given and is only available if it is without the sacrifice of others, then no one can have a right to healthcare, food, shelter, etc. These can only be considered entitlements that government can provide and that government can just as easily take away. But understand that for this entitlement to be available, government must first take something from somebody else, the taxpayer or the provider.
The Tea Party APPEARS to be concerned with our Constitutional rights. I have SERIOUS, SERIOUS doubts about that.
My question is:
WHERE WERE YOU ALL WHEN I WAS FLYING MY GADSDEN FLAG YEARS AGO & THE GREATEST AFFRONT TO OUR CONSTITUTION WAS ENACTED IN 2002 (The so-called "patriot" Act, suspending habeus corpus, warrants, etc.) ???
THAT WAS & IS the GREATEST threat to our constituional liberties than ANY legislation that has been enacted since.
WAKE UP & SMELL THE B.S. PEOPLE !!!
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Scott, are you aware that the Constitution provides the government the power to suspend habeas corpus during times of war or insurrection? For you to ask where the Tea Party was when something happened before the birth of the movement is similar to my asking why my daughter wasn't there to help as I progressed through adolescence. It makes no sense.
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Great evasion.... So why wasn't the movement born when Bush was in office and was totally unconcerned with deficits? Where was the outrage, the constitution-thumping then? Does the Tea Party even have an answer to questions like this? How can they have any credibility at all if they were invisible during a time when the constitution was being violated far more than it is today?
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I always wished I had been born in the 1920's so that I would have come of age during the WWII era when this country was united in a common cause and when I might have been able to help fight the evil that was present in the world at that time. I also preferred the Big Band sounds of the 1930's and 1940's. I enjoyed Frank. Despite this I never once asked my parents why I couldn't have been born earlier. The question would not have made any more sense than the one you ask about why the Tea Parties were born in 2009 and not during the Bush Administration.
No Child Left Behind and the Medicare Prescription Drug program were certainly straws on the camel's back as was Bush's comprehensive immigration plan and they were criticized roundly by the conservative movement but it is obvious that the final straw that broke the camel's back was the 2009 stimulus bill, GM, Chrysler, Obamacare, etc. and this was when the Constitution began to be violated at an extreme never before seen in this country. You say, "Invisible at a time when the Constitution was being violated far more than it is today?" I think not. Today we have the federal government extorting bondholders and taking over GM to protect unions. During the Obama administration and Pelosi/Reid Congress we saw a healthcare bill pushed through the Congress without regard to or for the American people. Where in the Constitution does the federal government have insurance or healthcare among its enumerated powers? Today we have a Congress that is intent on passing legislation that transfers wealth from one citizen to another in an effort to achieve fairness. This is the kind of fairness that was also promoted by Bonnie and Clyde, Jesse James and Robin Hood. We have an Executive Branch that believes in the selective enforcement of laws and that truly treats citizens differently based upon both race and union membership.
And just where did I evade? You need to be more specific in your criticisms on this blog.
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