The fact of the matter is that the Democrat-Socialists currently in power in Washington, DC (and elsewhere in various state capitols), are currently doing everything in their power to ram Socialism down our throats while they have the power to do so, apparently being of the belief that the whole federal republic thing isn't working out anyway.  I suspect that this is because, somewhere deep within their dark hearts, they know that once the people band together, we will reclaim our God-given liberties and put our politicians back on their collective leash.  What Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Reid, et al, underestimated was just how many Americans are uninterested in their American Socialism, how willing we are to do something about it, and how quickly we would retaliate en masse.

The National Tea Party Movement is a phenomenal thing sweeping the country right now, but I'm compelled to ask myself a question:  How many of these partiers actually know what they're protesting and why it should be protested?  Sure, we're all bent out of shape (rightly) at the extreme, and extremely ridiculous, spending by the 111th Congress and the Obama Administration (which has already exceeded every single one of his predecessors . . . combined).  Some people get that all of this spending (and the debt that's being created in the process) is effectively burdening the next four generations or so of Americans (assuming that our country survives that long) with paying off that debt.  But is spending (and the taxation required to support it) why we are doing this?

The reason for this is that what the British Government had done from 1765 to 1773 was to systematically create a government-protected monopoly on tea importation (tea being a staple of colonial life) while simultaneously directly tax colonies that were not represented in British Parliament.  The monopoly on tea importation wasn't considered nearly as offensive as taxation without representation because, according to the British Constitution, subjects to the crown could not be taxed without the consent of their elected representatives.  According to the Patriot Party, the colonists could only be taxed by their respective colonial assemblies.  Not surprisingly, King George and Prime Minister Lord North continued to insist that Parliament had the right to legislate for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever."

In every colony save Massachusetts, Sons of Liberty protestors had forced the tea consignees to either resign or return the imported tea to Britain.  (In Charleston, notably, the entire tea cargo was seized by the local SOL group and later sold to finance Revolutionary War operations.)  However, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, determined to not back down, convinced the tea consignees to insist on the delivery of the import duty before allowing either the tea to be offloaded or the cargo ships to return to England.  Over the course of seventeen days (November 29 to December 16) in 1773, there was an ongoing standoff between the Patriots and the Loyalists, with the ships' captains being allowed to neither unload their cargo nor sail for England.

Ultimately, Governor Hutchinson's stubborn refusal to adopt any other than a hard-line approach to the Sons of Liberty provoked the Boston Tea Party later defended by Samuel Adams as "a principled protest and the only remaining option the people had to defend their constitutional rights."  The British government's reaction, the Coercive (or Intolerable) Acts, sparked such colonial outrage that the Battles of Lexington and Concord followed, resulting in the American Revolutionary War for Independence.

At this point let's be clear that the actions by the Sons of Liberty had little to do with taxation and high prices.  The prominent issue, rather, was the extent of Parliament's authority in the colonies.  The purpose of the tax program - to make leading local officials independent of colonial influence - was viewed as a dangerous infringement of colonial rights.  Another major concern for merchants was that the Tea Act gave the East India Company a legal monopoly on the tea trade, and it was feared that this government-created monopoly might be extended in the future to include other goods.

In the United States Declaration of Independence, the Second Continental Congress laid out at length the case for severing all political ties as subjects of the British Crown.  The core of their argument was that:

• As a matter of Natural Law people have the "right of revolution" as a final recourse against a government that has overstepped its boundaries and become the means of general oppression - provided that the grounds for independence are reasonable and explicable.

• King George and Parliament had systematically violated the most basic of the colonists' rights - for the direct purpose of establishing an absolute Tyranny over the colonies - and were thus no longer fit as rulers of the colonies.

• Every attempt by the colonists to seek a peaceful redress of their grievances had not only been merely unsuccessful, they had been met with further injurious behavior from the British Crown.

• Because these conditions had been the whole product of the British government, of necessity the United States of America were compelled to absolve all allegiance to the British Crown, sever and dissolve all political connection with the British Government, and assume independent status among the nations of the earth.

Granted, someone should be carping loud and long about the runaway government spending and the taxation that must happen to support it.  Without question, someone needs to complain in a very public way about government policies that cripple businesses for the enrichment of those who clearly aren't capable of earning a paycheck on their own.  And absolutely someone ought to say something about the government that, on both sides of the aisle and at every level, has become increasingly part of the problem.

But all of these are symptoms.  The root cause is much deeper than this.

America, as a nation, was conceived on the notion that all people are created equal, and that each person is endowed by God with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (as chief among others).  Governments are instituted throughout mankind for the purpose of providing security for these rights, and derive both their proper authority and just power from the consent of the people that are being governed.  That's our core concept; we are a nation with a government, not the other way around.

The United States Constitution was carefully laid out to specify precisely which powers each branch of the federal government could exercise, as well as to reserve numerous powers to the states and protect the rights of the people.  The resulting federal republic system is still the newest idea in the entire history of human government.  Having had a bad experience with a too-powerful central government, the Founders were very careful to place strict limits on what the national government would be allowed to do.  They understood that any action of government, outside of its legitimate functions, serves only to infringe upon, or injure outright, the inherent rights of the people being governed.  An individual's legitimate rights are inherent within the person, not a dispensation of the government, and any argument otherwise invites tyranny.

But along the way, something went wrong.  Starting in the 1860s, and picking up exponentially since the 1930s, the American people began to fear that certain problems and issues were of such a nature that only the government (and only the federal government at that) could properly handle them.  In trickles at first, they surrendered their liberty and free enterprise to federal central planning and management; but eventually it became a wholesale increasing dependence on "Uncle Sam" for more and more.  In the process, we forgot that the government is at its most dangerous when our desire to have it help us blinds us to its power to harm us.

So now we have entire swaths of American society that firmly believe that the federal government should be providing cradle-to-grave entitlements for basic necessities.  The problem with that mindset is that the government, being a not-for-profit entity (at least it's supposed to be), has to come up with the money to pay for these entitlements . . . because they ain't free.  Ultimately, the only possible source of that money is the people being governed; those who are still self-reliant, still making either a profit or an honest paycheck, and still possessing money that can be taken through confiscatory taxation practices.  (This holds true even if the money is initially borrowed from other countries, because that pay-back money has to come from somewhere.)

Likewise, we now have entire subsections of American enterprise that have it in their heads that the central planning and regulation of the Executive Department makes more sense than the free-market system.  The problem with that mindset is that the government, outside of its legitimate functions, does absolutely nothing as effectively or as economically as the private sector.  (Farming, for example, is downright easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the nearest cornfield.)  And yet we now have the omniscient federales involved in nearly every sector of the private economy, through either regulation or, more recently, government-owned-and-operated businesses.

How did we get this way?  The answer is easier than you'd think.

Simply put, as a nation we got lazy.  We developed the notion that we no longer had to concern ourselves with being self reliant, since the big brother of government would gladly do all of the heavy lifting for us.  We stopped believing in our capacity for self-government, abandoned the American principle of enterprise, and adopted the confession that an intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can manage our lives for us better than we can ourselves.  Now this likely isn't true for everyone (certainly no one actually reading this), but take a look around . . . isn't this how most people in this country honestly believe they're to live their lives now?

The deterioration of every society (and its government) begins with the decay of the very principle on which it was founded.  This idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the governed, makes its first, last, and greatest stand in this nation.  The federal government has taken on functions that it was never intended to perform and which it doesn't perform well - to the point that our natural, inalienable rights are now increasingly considered a dispensation of the government.  Governments don't control things, especially the economy; they control people . . . and must use force and coercion to accomplish that.  What the government ought to be doing is upholding and reinforcing, instead of undermining, those institutions (religion, education, and family) which are custodians of the very values upon which every free civilization is founded.

We have, however, forgotten this.  But no more.  This is why we protest:

• We reject a government that has so diluted private property rights that "public interest" is almost anything that the central planners decide it should be.

• We reject a government that destroys the very substance of moral fiber by using a permanent dole to perpetuate poverty.

• We reject a government that borrows endlessly in order to spend beyond its means, and has not the slightest compunction about sticking our grandchildren's grandchildren with the debt.

• We reject a government that wants to pick and choose which individuals have value, defining others as less than human and therefore devoid of value, respect, and the right to life.

• We reject a government that views its power to tax as all the authority is needs to take from the people whatever is necessary to keep government programs running.

• We reject a government that has so proliferated bureaus, with their thousands of regulations, and cost us so many of our constitutional safeguards, that they claim we must now accept as necessary greater government involvement in the ordinary citizens' everyday affairs.

• We reject a government that willingly subordinates American interests to an organization that has become so structurally unsound that today you can muster a two-thirds vote on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly exclusively using nations that represent less than 10 percent of the world's population.

• We reject a government that professes as policy that this nation must resign itself to inevitable and irreversible decline, renounce its high standard of living and production, and join in the sharing of scarcity.

And let's be clear about this; it isn't about political parties.  Lemmings, RINOs, elephants, and jackasses are all guilty here; both major parties have taken their turn trampling on liberty (granted, one more so than the other).  While local committees may indeed get involved, the instant that this movement becomes about one party or another, this movement is as good as dead.  This is about We The People taking back our country.  The problems currently facing us are not so complex that they are beyond our comprehension - and the answers to those problems are simple, but they are neither convenient nor easy.

We will face resistance; our Founders did, and so has everyone who has dared to stand for liberty in the face of tyranny.  The empirical evidence of history is that those who succeed under a government of oppression have stopped at nothing to maintain their positions, and this batch of tyrants will be no different.  If you desire an easy road, or if you are not firmly convinced of the rightness of this cause, then stay home; better you remain in the bleachers than faint on the field.  But if you value your liberty above all else, and will pay any price short of your personal honor to secure that liberty for your posterity, then sharpen your swords, fix your bayonets, say your prayers, and let's have at them.

The time is now; the place is here.  Do what you can, where you're at, with what you have.  We surround them, and we will be silent no more.

Deo Volente