Posted by
Marked in Pgh on Monday, December 08, 2008 6:39:55 PM
What can we do as individual citizens, as individual bloggers after the election? We continue being who we are, individual voices of liberty, dissent, opinion and thought. We become the pamphleteers and the New Press of our age, like some of the Founders, including Tom Paine, against the people in power. It's an American tradition, and our right.
Long before the creation to the Constitution, it was our God given right of dissent, protected and backed up later on by the freedom of the press clause in the first Amendment. Thomas Paine was very argumentative with the other Founding Fathers and pulled no punches. He even questioned the legitimacy of George Washington's birth.
Today, no one can take freedom of speech or of the press from us, unless we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed. We are not overwhelmed, we are not intimidated. We are Americans and this is our country. We have the right to disagree and state our opinions and views. We are not subjects of the Federal government. We are the owners of the government and nothing shall subvert us to something the people of America brought about after they won their independence through armed revoution, to create "a more perfect Union". The more perfect Union can not be the agent of our own repression.
So, we keep on writing; we keep on on pointing out the blind sides, the blind spots in the News Media coverage as proponents of the New Pamphleteers, the New Media and the New Press. Congress can threaten to pass draconian new laws, but "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". We do not need the interpretation of the courts for language so plain and unambiguous. Any laws passed by Congress which violates the First Amendment are null and void and we are not beholden to them. If there was ever a moment for civil disobedience, it will be when these unconstitutional laws are imposed.
Will we prevail? We, as Americans, are a naturally rebellious people. The impostition of new taxes by the British Crown without representation of those imposed upon, resulted in the creation of a new country. A tax on whiskey led to the Whiskey Rebellion here in the Pittsburgh area, at that time the frontier, against George Washington's own administration. Prohibition was widely ignored by the American people living under this unenforceable constitutional amendment. That fact can be seen by comparing two statistics. How many speakeasies existed in America during Prohibition? The answer, about the same number as the number of bars which existed in America before Prohibition.
Even the Soviet Union could not change the economic behavior of the oppressed and enslaved so-called Soviet citizenry. It only drove such behavior underground and created a huge black market as the people reacted to the natural economic laws of unlimited demands pursuing limited supplies.
Free enterprise allows free individuals to exchange goods and services among themselves in order to satisfy their needs in free markets. Any constrictions on these activities, arbitrarily imposed by the government, are disturbances in normal activities and create artificial limitations to the best utilization of goods and services. Free enterprise is very democratic in its economic dynamics. Central planning is oppressive, unresponsive and tyrannical in its distortions within any economy and society imposed upon. This is just as true concerning the free exchange of ideas, political dissent and thought.
No matter how many degrees liberals in government have printed on parchment and hung on their walls; all these overeducated experts can do is to fleece the people in order to have more sheepskins to print their additional degrees and decrees upon. None of them could ever come up with the idea of, or implement the plan for something like Federal Express, McDonald's, Wendy's, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Apple Computers or the E.I.B. Network. The potential of the individual living in freedom is infinite. The potential of government bureaucracies is limited by the mental disorders of its entrenched bureaucrats.
We are the entrepreneurs of free thought. We are the New Press.