Historical Quotes That Apply To Today

Pick your area of government.  First, let's look at needless complexity:

"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if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow."
-- James Madison --

Consider the so-called TARP bailout bill that Congress passed a couple months ago.  It began as a three page document, and ended up a massive behemoth of over 400 pages.  Remember the amnesty bill in 2007?  It was hundreds of pages long, yet Congress wanted to pass it within a couple days; it's no wonder that humongous amounts of damage would have been done to the economy and this country via - it contained countless passages that almost no one had the time to even read, much less accurately understand.  And how about the current tax code?  Multi-billion dollar industries have grown up with the single purpose of understanding and applying the tax code, which is tens of thousands of pages long.  On most issues, complexity serves only to muddle things unnecessarily.

How about the way American citizens should view our elected leaders:

"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree."
-- James Madison --

"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
-- Edward R. Murrow --

Amen.  We as citizens have every right (and responsibility) to demand accountability of our elected leaders, even in their personal lives.  By the very nature of their high-profile positions, they give up much of what 'normal' citizens would consider to be required privacy.  By becoming timid with our own leaders, those leaders become more and more aggressive.  Sadly, that aggressiveness results first and foremost in the pure acquisition of power, which inevitably increases the size of government.  I think the Founders are probably rolling in their graves at how big the federal government has become.  So how should our government treat us as citizens?  I like these quotes:

"[A] wise and frugal government... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
-- Thomas Jefferson --
(h/t Heavy-Handed Politics)

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
-- Thomas Jefferson --

"A universal peace, it is to be feared, is in the catalogue of events, which will never exist but in the imaginations of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts."
-- James Madison --

"The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."
-- George Washington --

Obviously, the first two quotes speak to the size and responsibility of our federal government.  It should never engage in the governing or controlling of free markets and industries, nor should it undertake redistribution to move resources from any citizen to any other citizen.  Under Jefferson's definition of good government, 2009 America is failing miserably, and I suspect it'll only get worse in the coming months.  What the government should do, however, is prepare a strong national defense to protect our people and assets - universal peace is a utopian dream that will never happen in reality.  Only the strong have the ability to maintain peace, and only the strong and upright will be willing to maintain peace.  America has served as this force in the world for decades, but we are slipping, both in strength and in the uprightness of our moral standing.  This needs to be reversed if we want to maintain the global leadership, and thus freedom itself.  As Washington said, the fire of liberty will only be sustained by the American people, not the government.

To that end, the Founding Fathers had much to say on what will keep liberty strong.  A lot of that strength depends on avoiding collectivism (aka socialism):

"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders."
-- Samuel Adams --
(h/t Heavy-Handed Politics)

"A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever."
-- John Adams --

The key in that first quote is, quite simply, ignorance.  The ignorance we fight against today is the result of decades of liberalism creeping through the educational system, dumbing down every subject and injecting political correctness in place of high standards.  If one didn't know better, one might have thought that Adams was speaking directly to us today, don't you think?

The second quote is nothing less than the stakes that we face now: the steady erosion of freedom in our capitalist society.  By walking down the road toward socialism, we kiss our freedoms goodbye, and we will not get them back until we hit rock bottom (if even then).  Look at the rest of the world - they've been trying socialism for decades, and have finally figured out that it doesn't work, so now they're all cutting taxes to become more competitive.  France, Ireland, Sweden...they've all started to copy the American capitalist model again, so why, then, are Democrats in the U.S. insisting we follow the failing example of those same countries' plunge into socialism?

Because they're liberals.

Socialism is all about 'fairness', which they believe is far more important than success, legal consistency, or free market principles (never mind the fact that the simple act of them exclusively defining 'fair' is inherently unfair).  And, because socialism gives them the one thing they crave more than life itself (literally): power.  Socialism gives liberals the power to control the lives of subjec...I mean, citizens through the distribution of goods and services as they see fit, through blanket dictates that stifle innovation and development according to their pet issues, and through the silencing of trifling matters like free speech, dissent, and freedom.

Welcome to America in 2009, where liberals aspire to be just like France was in 1970.  Or, for that matter, like all of Europe was in the 14th century.  It's too bad they have so much power now - they just might get their wish.

There's my two cents.