Thursday, March 02, 2006

Maureen Farrell: Tired of Being Lied to? Modern History You Can't Afford to Ignore

Maureen Farrell: Tired of Being Lied to? Modern History You Can't Afford to Ignore:
The founding fathers were particularly sensitive to liberty's fleeting nature and power's corruptive tendencies. Thomas Jefferson said that 'even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny,' while James Madison warned that 'If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.' And at the close of the Constitutional Convention, when someone asked Ben Franklin what type of government the framers had drafted, he presciently replied, 'A republic, if you can keep it.'

But America's wisest leaders did not merely warn against the death of the republic, but about how and why its democratic principles would gradually wither away. 'Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation [of power] first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence,' Jefferson wrote in 1821. 'We are free today substantially, but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few,' Madison said in the New York Post.
Wow! Those founders were so smart. I bet they're turning in their graves at what the current administration and its cronies are doing.

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