How and Why Governments are Created.

This is not new to the political landscape.

I have heard talks by Ronald Reagan and read speeches from former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson espouse these very eternal principals. (I found a link to his speech by searching "The Proper Role of Government" on Google.)

Both of them have cited Frederic Bastiat as one of the champions of these principals and have said these same principals are the foundation of our great Republic.

Let’s examine how governments get started.

You are back in the primitive days. You live with a tribe.

Your tribe gets attacked and pillaged from time to time. You sometimes have your own people stealing and murdering your neighbors.

So, you therefore logically organize some of your tribe to become your government to provide order out of chaos.

The job of this government is to protect you from criminals from without, (other tribes), and from within, (criminals in your village.).

You gladly give some of your possessions, (taxes), to have some of your tribe to provide full time service to these tasks. (They need money to live on, so taxes are required to provide them with the tools and sustenance to do their job.)

Now the last thing you hired them to do was to pillage your property so they might give some of the loot to their friends, (voters), who are not in the government.

Collecting taxes in order to function is not the same as having the tax collector come by and say, “My wife’s cousin is a voter, and I will take an additional amount from you so I may give it to her.”

The key here is that “fair or just” taxes are used by the government to protect you from people or armies who want to harm you or pillage your property.

Any time the very government you hired to protect you, becomes an instrument to pillage your possessions, then they have perverted the law.

It becomes easy to see the immorality of “unjust” plunders by the very government you hired to protect you.

Immoral acts are not “Far and Just” actions of any government.

Robin Hood may have been a local hero, but he was still a thief.

To quote Bastiat:

If every person has the right to defend -- even by force -- his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly.

Thus the principle of collective right -- its reason for existing, its lawfulness -- is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute.

Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force -- for the same reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.

Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers?

Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?

If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces.

And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all."

In a Democracy the majority gets to rule the minority, but in a Republic as we have, the individual is protected from the majority by way of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

These rights include the 5th and 14th Amendments, which prohibit the government from unjustly removing your property. In the 5th we read “nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

And in the 14th Amendment we read: “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Ever hear of “And to the Democracy for which it stands?” How about “Battle Hymn of the Democracy?”

Again in a Democracy 50.1% of the vote can tell the minority to do whatever they wish, but in a Republic, the government is specifically told it can not take away property or rights and the functions of government are the only reasons to take property from the individual.

Initially the framers were so worried about the reach of the Federal Government that they spelled out how to protect us from “taxation without representation.” They essentially said that each state would send an amount to the Federal Government based upon it’s number of citizens, as done by a census.

In other words, California you have “x” number of people, send us “x” amount. Oklahoma you have “x” amount of people, you send us “x” amount. They were fearful of a “direct” tax. But alas the greedy people in D.C. had that changed with the 16th Amendment, and the rest is history.

As Will Rogers Jr. said, “We have the best people in Washington that money can buy."