you would think we could have lasted more than a few hundred years..... especially since we had such a good plan.
Actually that is why it happens. We had a good plan. It created more prosperity and wealth than any other plan in human history, allowed scientific inquiry to flourish, and capital to fund it. As a result - each generation saw huge gains in quality of living - even the poorest of us. Like an abundant crop in a field, we attracted the locusts and other parasites. The useless flock to where there is plenty. The useless thrive, like rats, on just our garbage. And then they multiply, they use sheer numbers to take control, and it all falls down. We got less than two centuries because we were so very, very successful.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck."-Robert Heinlein
We did not listen to the Founders!
We are drunk on debt, drunk on too much Federal government, too brainwashed in Democracy and too illiterate on Representative Republican principles, too ashamed of God, too permissive of judicial activism, too interested in selfish wants and too disdainful of individual rights and responsibilities.
"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." --Thomas Jefferson
"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816
"He that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing." -- Benjamin Franklin (from his writings, 1758) Reference: Franklin: Writings, Lemay, ed., Library of America (1300)
"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government." --Thomas Jefferson
"Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." –James Madison
"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." -- Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIX, 1787)
"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." --James Madison
"The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." - James Madison, Federalist 47
"[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few." -- John Adams (An Essay on Man's Lust for Power, 29 August 1763) Reference: Original Intent, Barton (338); original The Papers of John Adams, Taylor, ed., vol. 1 (83)
"Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." --John Adams, letter to John Taylor, 1814
"[D]emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." -- James Madison (Federalist No. 10, 23 November 1787) Reference: Madison, Federalist No. 10 (81)
"For the same reason that the members of the State legislatures will be unlikely to attach themselves sufficiently to national objects, the members of the federal legislature will be likely to attach themselves too much to local objects." -- James Madison (Federalist No. 47, 1 February 1788) Reference: Madison, Federalist No. 46.
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others." -- James Madison (Federalist No. 58, 1788) Reference: Madison, Federalist No. 48
"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -- James Madison (speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 16 June 1788) Reference: Bartlett's Quotations (352)
"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions." --James Madison, letter to Edmund Pendleton, 1792
"If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify." - Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 33, 3 January 1788)
"Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants. " - Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 1, 27 October 1787) Reference: Hamilton, Federalist No. 1 (35)
"The State governments possess inherent advantages, which will ever give them an influence and ascendancy over the National Government, and will for ever preclude the possibility of federal encroachments. That their liberties, indeed, can be subverted by the federal head, is repugnant to every rule of political calculation." -- Alexander Hamilton (speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, 17 June 1788) Reference: The Works of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Cabot Lodge, ed., vol.2 (17)
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." --Benjamin Franklin
"And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever." --Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 18, 1781
"...[R]eason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." –George Washington
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." -- John Adams (Address to the Military, 11 October 1798) Reference: America's God and Country (10-11)
"Statesmen by dear Sir, may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand....The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a great Measure, than they have it now, They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty." -- John Adams (letter to Zabdiel Adams, 21 June 1776) Reference: Our Sacred Honor, Bennett, pg. 371.
"The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities impressed with it." -- James Madison (letter to Frederick Beasley, 20 November 1825) Reference: Writings of Madison, Hunt, ed., vol. 9 (230)
"...[N]atural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race...." --Alexander Hamilton
"If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it?" -- Benjamin Franklin (to Thomas Paine, Date Unknown) Reference: Original Intent, Barton (297); original The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Sparks, ed., vol. 10 (281-282)
"Religion and good morals are the only solid foundation of public liberty and happiness." --Samuel Adams
"The Constitution on which our Union rests, shall be administered ... according to the safe and honest meaning contemplated by the plain understanding of the people of the United States at the time of its adoption...." --Thomas Jefferson
"The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If 'Thou shalt not covet' and 'Thou shalt not steal' were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free." --John Adams, A Defense of the American Constitutions, 1787
"But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever." --John Adams
"Nothing has yet been offered to invalidate the doctrine that the meaning of the Constitution may as well be ascertained by the Legislative as by the Judicial authority." -- James Madison (speech in the Congress of the United States, 18 June 1789)
"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be to-morrow." --James Madison (likely), Federalist No. 62, 1788
"With respect to the two words 'general welfare,' I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators." --James Madison
"Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new Constitution will, if established, be a FEDERAL, and not a NATIONAL constitution." --James Madison, Federalist No. 39
"The middle way is no way at all, If we finally fail in this great and glorious contest, it will be by bewildering ourselves in groping for the middle way." - John Adams, Congressional Delegate in a letter to General Horatio Gates, March 1776: John Adams, David McCullough, Simon & Schuster, 2001 (100-101)
And when all else fails, when politics has run its course and people in States or any other locally organized entity are denied to leave the Federal Charter peacefully, our Founders left only one remaining option. But our current rulers would take that option away from us.
“To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.” --Richard Henry Lee
"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? It is feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American. ...[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people." --A Pennsylvanian, The Pennsylvania Gazette, 20 February 1788
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." --Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment, quoted by Thomas Jefferson in Commonplace Book
"And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress ... to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.... " --Samuel Adams
"No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms." --Thomas Jefferson
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." --Thomas Jefferson
