Purpose of Government

“The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors.”
― Thomas Jefferson

We, as citizens, have grown lazy.  We have forgotten our legacy and our duty as left to us by those brave, courageous men who fired the first shot for our freedom in 1775.  We have forgotten what it means to be free.

With so many of the details and controversies surrounding politics assaulting our senses on a daily basis, it is easy to become numb and oblivious to the consequences of what it all means.  As a result, we have become apathetic, we have faltered, and we have allowed our birthright to liberty to start slipping between our fingers.

On a daily basis we see our government declare a new war on some benign object from which it feels the need to protect the people.  Sodas cause obesity, we must ban sodas.  Salt causes high blood pressure, we must ban salt.  Guns are used by the evil and insane to take life, we must remove them from our society.  Lack of health insurance leads to people not utilizing services or seeking services for free, we must mandate all people have health insurance.   Drugs are deemed harmful, therefore we must dedicated resources, money, and life to their eradication.  With each of these, as government power and reach grew, our freedom shrank.

As times evolved, we have allowed the government to develop new rights and privileges:  Right to sexual freedom, right to a cell phone, right to a job, right to retire in luxury, right from the consequences of our own choices, and the list goes on.  We see consistent measures taken to try our limit our freedoms, in the belief that we are simply to naive to understand the impact.  Drones fly above our skies, presidents spy on citizens and media, kill/enemy lists are created without oversight or due process, our wealth is confiscated to be used as government sees fit, not as we see fit, and other violations too numerous to list.   Again, with each of these, as the influence of government expanded, liberty contracted.

In each of these circumstances, we listen to politicians dredge up the ghosts of our founding fathers and of our constitution to provide teeth to their arguments, to justify their over reach.  However, we have politicians that cannot tell the Constitution from the Declaration of Independence.  Politicians who are ignorant and blind to the purpose and provision of the articles contained within the Constitution.  Likewise, we have a state sponsored education system that fails, literally fail, to teach our young the foundation and meaning of this incredible document that serves as the law of our land.  As such, we have allowed the birth of low-information voters, those that know nothing outside of what they are told by the media and an ignorant ruling class.  Voters who are swindled, misdirected, and lied to every single day, abrogating freedom for handouts and made up rights, allowing their votes to be purchased by the highest bidder.  It’s time we remember our history, remember why we were provided with the Constitution, and what is the true purpose of government.

Our founding fathers sacrificed life, wealth, and comfort to provide our country with an opportunity to pursue happiness absent of tyranny.  They fought and won the right of the people to self-govern.  The key here, self-govern, as they did not wish to trade the tyranny of the crown for tyranny of another.  No, they sought to isolate the people, both then and now, from having to go thru the same trials as they did.  As such, they create the representative democracy that gave birth to the American Experiment.  An experiment based on the premise that people were granted certain inalienable rights as derived by their creator, but recognizing that human imperfection exists and that it has a tendency to abuse power if granted. 

Begrudgingly, they created a central government with just enough power to protect our nation and serve as mediator between states, but they constrained those powers thru a purposely worded Constitution.  They sought to balance, and separate, the powers of central government through a carefully constructed system of checks and balances.  To all other things, they left the power of rule to the states and ultimately, to the people.  Within this power, they provided a mechanism to amend the constitution, to allow the people the right to delegate power back to the government as they saw fit. 

While it was with good intent, is this final attribute that has been used against us.  Under the guise of security and “rights”, we’ve allowed ourselves to delegate so much power back to the government, that we are no longer self-governed.  We now have a government that finds itself above the law.  We find ourselves once again under tyranny, not by the crown, but by bureaucracy.  We have a ruling class that deems itself not subjected to the laws that they create for us.  Tyrants that wish to impose restrictions, or outright denial, of rights that are guaranteed to us.  Per Thomas Jefferson’s warning above, we now have a government that rules in the interests of the governors, not the governed.

It is time for us, the people, to realize that the Constitution was not established to grant government unlimited centralized power, but instead limit that power and reserve it to the people for themselves.  Rather than following this blueprint and restricting government, we have allowed what history has shown happens with all governments, and that is to permit the corruption of law and to allow the powerful few to rule the masses.

It’s time for the people to remember, the purpose of government is to protect our rights, not to grant them.  We are a people endowed with natural rights, rights that preexist government, rights that can not be rightfully taken away by governments, nor must we seek permission to utilize them.

 They cannot silence our speech in an effort to dissent or speak our minds or prevent us from gathering to redress our grievances. 

They cannot take our weapons. 

They cannot confiscate and redistribute our private property. 

They cannot break down our doors and search our homes. 

They cannot murder, imprison, or use the force of government to intimidate us for our beliefs without due process before our peers.

Contrary to current events, the ability to violate these principals is not granted to government.  They are overreaches allowed by the people, overreaches that we, the people,  must bring to an end.  We cannot allow them to pervert and manipulate the language of the Constitution,  to subvert its meaning and intent,  in an effort to deprive of us of our liberty.  At some point, we must say enough, we must take back the power left to us by our founding fathers. 

We are not slaves, we are not servants,  we are free men.  We are free men who determine our own course of government.  Liberty is our natural right and should government become abusive, we have duty to abolish or reform that government to bring it back to the core, basic principals prescribed by the people’s Constitution.  Now is that time.

The Constitution is not there to limit the power of the American People, but the power of government.  The Constitution does not grant government power, it grants US power.   The purpose of government is to protect the rights of the people, not provide for them.

Government only exists because we allow it to exist and it’s high time that we, the people, remember that and take back that power that belongs to us, to take back the liberty that is ours by birthright. 

“The government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.”
― Mark Twain