To one thing immigrants must make up their minds, or, they will be disappointed in every expectation of happiness as Americans. They must cast off the European skin, never to resume it.
Continue reading “Becoming American”Category: individualism
There is no ‘we’ without ‘I’
Any group or ‘collective,’ large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the ‘rights’ of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking … A group, as such, has no rights.
The people, authority, and responsibility
The people are Sovereign. … at the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people; and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects … with none to govern but themselves; the citizens of America are equal as fellow citizens, and as joint tenants in the sovereignty.
The Constitution protects minorities
If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution.
In America, the citizen is sovereign
Men and women must prevail over the endless agencies and bureaus that would reduce human beings to computerized abstractions and program people into numbers and statistics. Today’s mounting danger is from mass government … we must not let them prevail. … Never forget that in America our sovereign is the citizen. … The state is a servant … It must never become an anonymous monstrosity that masters everyone.
Which shall govern?
The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.
The greatest threat to individual liberty
The Left’s ‘resistance’ to Trump is a tacit acknowledgement that conservatives have been correct all along: The great threat to individual liberty is government.
The primacy of the individual
At the heart of western freedom and democracy is the belief that
the individual man … is the touchstone of value, and all society,
groups, the state, exist for his benefit. Therefore the enlargement
of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and
abiding practice of any western society.
If you don’t work, neither should you eat
The necessity of every one paying in his own labor for what he consumes, affords the only legitimate and effectual check to excessive luxury, which has so often ruined individuals, states and empires; and which has now brought almost universal bankruptcy upon us.
Public sector vs. private
Big Government flourishes with small citizens. This is true as a matter of ideological cause and effect: by definition, the more powerful you believe the centralized State should be, the less respect you have for individual citizens.
Continue reading “Public sector vs. private”