{"id":1506,"date":"2010-11-27T22:20:23","date_gmt":"2010-11-28T04:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/?p=1506"},"modified":"2013-09-06T18:23:45","modified_gmt":"2013-09-07T00:23:45","slug":"its-a-wonderful-life-american-political-edition-parts-i-v","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/?p=1506","title":{"rendered":"“It’s a Wonderful Life,” American Political Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

(Opening scene: Angels, represented by twinkling stars,\u00a0are talking about a troubled soul on Earth. They review this soul\u2019s life, and the circumstances that led to its present attempt to kill itself\u2026.)<\/p>\n

It was conceived\u00a0with great hopes in a simpler time,\u00a0by a variety of generous parents, and a few original sins. England (via the British Empire), in which modern democracy developed; The Enlightenment,\u00a0characterized by\u00a0a fluorescence of rationalistic philosophy; a wide-open new land, with an easily displaced indigenous population; abundant imported and domestically bred slave labor. It\u00a0developed a grandiose vision for itself, one comprised of the somewhat incompatible memes of ‘manifest destiny’ and champion of liberty, and an exaggerated\u00a0faith in its own exceptionalism.<\/p>\n

But, as often happens, life presented unforeseen challenges which diverted this soul, the\u00a0sovereign American People,\u00a0from its youthful dreams. It gradually was forced to confront its original sins, brutally divided by one of them. Innovations complicated the\u00a0landscape in which its dreams had been formed.\u00a0It had to cope with a\u00a0world\u00a0comprised of other people with interests of their own,\u00a0people less convinced of\u00a0the\u00a0benevolence of this\u00a0powerful and self-interested nation\u00a0than its own\u00a0populace persistently was (rather too conveniently).<\/p>\n

But despite this diversion from its original dreams, it was the same soul, peforming many good deeds, more often born of pragmatism than idealism,\u00a0that were not always part of the original plan. It grew to address a changing world, doing what needed to be done to increase the welfare of those who depended on it. It intervened in its parent-continent when brutality racked\u00a0the latter\u2019s\u00a0fields and towns, and then watched that continent, unencumbered by youthful dreams,\u00a0combine the best fruits of their child\u2019s aspirations with the reduced purism that comes from maturity.<\/p>\n

But something in the people clung to the purity of youthful dreams, sulking with resistance\u00a0to adulthood\u2019s demands,\u00a0an error that\u00a0sometimes characterizes idealistic youth. Just at the point when\u00a0both the people and their government were on the verge of following the mature wisdom of moderation and adaptation, the\u00a0oversimplistic idolater within, childish and narcissistic rather than noble and generous, rebelled, and rent this national soul in an internal conflict over whether mature moderation would prevail, or childish purism.<\/p>\n

It\u00a0rebelled in a moment of crisis, a large faction of the people chanting the mindless refrain, \u201cGovernment is not the solution, it\u2019s the problem! The world would be better off without this government we\u2019ve allowed to grow and grow, displacing the purity we had believed in and tried to implement in our youth!\u00a0We would be better off if we had not allowed\u00a0the lessons of life\u00a0to\u00a0adapt those youthful dreams to the\u00a0demands of\u00a0reality!\u201d<\/p>\n

And so this soul\u2019s guardian angel decided to show it what the world would have been like without that modern government it now wished dead\u2026.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst,\u201d the angel said, \u201clet\u2019s look at what your country and world would have been like had you not further amended the Constitution after the Bill of Rights.<\/p>\n

\u201cSlavery would not have been legally abolished by the 13th Amendment, nor Congress empowered to enforce its prohibition.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 14th Amendment\u2019s transformation of the legal framework of the country would never have occurred. The Dred Scott Decision, which held that no African American, whether free or slave, was an American citizen, would have remained the law of the land. The states\u2019 exemption from the Bill of Rights,\u00a0a document\u00a0originally interpreted to limit only the federal government\u2019s intrusion on state and individual rights, would have persisted, and the protections of the Constitution would have continued not\u00a0to apply\u00a0to or restrain state and local governments in any way. African American slaves would have continued to be counted, legally,\u00a0as 3\/5 of a human being.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 15th Amendment\u2019s legal guarantee, not to be effectively enforced for a century more, that all citizens, regardless of race, have the right to vote, would not have come into existence.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 17th Amendment\u2019s increase in direct democracy, by shifting elections for U.S. Senators from the state legislatures to the people of the state, would not have happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cWomen\u00a0might still be denied the vote in some states.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe increased tardiness and unevenness with which the United States would have dealt with these morally enervating issues would have reduced the human capital of the nation, delaying its fuller liberation and development longer, if not, in some places, indefinitely. It would have been a less innovative country, and a less inspiring one to other nations. Resentments would have grown even stronger, divisions even deeper, the problems bred by these defects even more inextricably embedded in the fabric of your society. Those who later depended on the United States as a beacon of liberty would see only a quagmire of exploitation and oppression, either lagging even farther behind the finally pacified continent across the Atlantic it continually claimed superiority to, or, by not being a strong enough nation to lead, leaving\u00a0the world into a downward spiral from which it couldn\u2019t escape.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world would have been a very different place indeed had the United States not become what it became. And while there are those in the world who think that would have been a good thing, sometimes with considerable justification, it most certainly wouldn\u2019t have been a good thing for America, nor, all things considered,\u00a0for\u00a0global peace and prosperity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, Angel,\u201d the suicidal faction groaned condescendingly. \u201cFirst of all, most of us don\u2019t object to Constitutional Amendments, but rather to other increased exercises of federal power without recourse to such amendments. And second of all, many of these things would have come to pass by the choice of individual states, without the federal government imposing them on the states.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSlavery wasn\u2019t going anywhere, anytime in the foreseeable future, without the legal and military coercion of the federal government,\u201d replied the angel. \u201cThe gradual incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment by successive Supreme Court decisions, which\u00a0continued into very recent times (because state and local governments\u00a0were not universally committed to protecting those rights), would not have occurred, and those states would remain free to disregard those protections. We see even today how fragile those protections\u00a0are, at the hands of those who claim most respect for them, in the repetition of the refrain that granting due process to those suspected of certain crimes (e.g., terrorism) reduces the rule of law, a chant that is phenomenally ignorant of what the term \u2018rule of law\u2019 means in a Constitutional republic (hint: ignoring it out of convenience, in order to increase conviction rates, no matter how heinous the crime, is the exact\u00a0opposite<\/em><\/strong> of what it means).<\/p>\n

\u201cAs for your other concerns, about increased exercises of federal power not granted by Constitutional amendments, follow me\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

The angel then said, \u201clet\u2019s look at what your country and world would have been like had you not had a strong federal government to hold the country together, pursue its collective interests, and impose its core values on its constituent parts (leaving aside for the moment the issues of so-called \u2018activist courts\u2019 and of the rise of the \u2018administrative state\u2019).<\/p>\n

\u201cIt took a strong federal government to end slavery and hold the union together during and after the Civil War. A century later, it took a strong federal government, complete with National Guard, to enforce court-ordered desegregation. And it took a strong federal government to pass The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which utilized attenuated Commerce Clause power to prohibit racial discrimination by private owners of commercial institutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt took a strong federal government, captured by the will of the people in a series of populist and progressive movements in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, to rein in \u2018the robber barons,\u2019 and redress the biggest disparity of wealth in this country ever\u2026, until today, when we have finally exceeded it. It took a strong federal government to give the country hope during The Great Depression, and, despite the revisionism popular with the far-right today, launch record-setting economic growth in its midst (from 1933-1937), until budget hawks managed to convince to FDR to compromise his policies to their concerns.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt took a strong federal government to mobilize the country and lead the allies\u00a0during World War II, and to lead NATO during the Cold War.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout these efforts, slavery might still be extant, and, certainly, Jim Crow (American \u2018Apartheid\u2019) would still be extant in some regions. The country would have fractured not just into two as a result of the southern cessation, but into multiple tiny republics, neither viable on their own nor of any import on the world stage.<\/p>\n

\u201cMexico and Canada, our more politically, economically and militarily successful neighbors to the north and south (in this alternate reality), probably would have annexed large chunks of what would otherwise have been The United States. European and World History would have been different, possibly with fascism prevailing in Europe and, eventually, threatening the tiny, weak republics across the Atlantic, in what would otherwise have been The United States of America.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere would have been nothing other than fascist Europe to check Soviet and Chinese expansion, and, it is more probable, given the lack of moral compass of both fascism and Sino-Soviet Communism, that they simply would have arrived at a mutually agreeable division of the world into competing but\u00a0mutually accommodating and reinforcing\u00a0tyrannies.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout a federal government as strong as this one has been, there would be no \u2018United States\u2019 today, certainly no liberties in some regions for those who were deprived them historically, and quite probably a more tyrannical world in general.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNext,\u201d the angel said, \u201clet\u2019s look at what your country and world would look like if you had not had an \u2018activist\u2019 judiciary interpreting the Constitution in ways relevant to, and adapting to, changing circumstances.\u201d (See http:\/\/www.law.emory.edu\/fileadmin\/journals\/elj\/58\/58.5\/Green.pdf<\/a>\u00a0for a comprehensive exploration of the concept, including a discussion of why it, appropriately applied,\u00a0has nothing to do with boosting individual liberty or governmental power, but rather refers to whether the judiciary adheres to the norms of judicial conduct which are its only real restraint.)<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the conventional, ideologically charged use of the term, all Supreme Court decisions involve ‘judicial activism,’ because those cases that the Supreme Court chooses to hear are precisely those cases that involve unresolved ambiguities, and require judicial interpretation. Therefore, a complete history of\u00a0the evolution of\u00a0Constitutional Law, as defined by Supreme Court decisions, is, in a sense, one important slice of the history of \u2018judicial activism,\u2019 as the term is commonly used. And without that fully institutionalized form of \u2018judicial activism,\u2019 which is coextensive with the doctrine of \u2018judicial review\u2019 established by Justice Marshall described below, there would be no enforceable Constitution, no\u00a0established and coherent rule of law to the extent that there is today in the United States. But rather than write a Constitutional Law synopsis, I\u2019ll just mention a few of the most important cases, that involved perhaps the greatest liberty of Constitutional interpretation on the Court\u2019s part, but without which we would be a nation with far weaker protections of individual liberties and rights than we\u00a0have today.<\/p>\n

\u201cChief Justice John Marshall<\/a> established the principle of \u2018judicial review\u2019 in Marbury v. Madison<\/a>\u00a0in 1803, the first and greatest act of judicial activism in U.S. History, without which there would have been no final authority on what was and was not Constitutional.\u00a0the lack of such judicial authority\u00a0would have inevitably undermined the rule of law that, more than anything else, has distinguished the United States.\u00a0Without the judicially determined Constitutional last word that Marshall successfully instituted, questions of Constitutionality, and thus ultimate legality, would be political footballs to a far greater extent than they already are,\u00a0overwhelmed by the bickering whims of conflicting ideologies and interests that characterize the rest of political discourse and decision-making. In other words, without this bold\u00a0initial act of judicial activism, the Constitution would have been an empty promise, and would be referenced today for strictly rhetorical rather than legal support,\u00a0a non-binding tool for political argumentation.\u00a0Uninformed lay opinions about what does and does not constitute Constitutionality would be raised to a par with legal analyses and Supreme Court holdings, reducing the Constitution to a meaningless blank slate on which each interest group and ideological camp could impress its own preferred interpretation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), the Supreme Court held that a facially neutral law that has the effect of discriminating (a selectively enforced San Francisco code restricting licensing for laundries to brick or stone buildings in order to target Chinese laundries which were built of wood) violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. This decision was not a foregone conclusion: The letter of the law itself didn\u2019t violate the Equal Protection clause, and so the decision can be said to be one of \u2018an activist judiciary.\u2019 But had it been more literal in its Constitutional interpretation, the Court would have set the precedent that discrimination is Constitutionally permissible as long as it is done implicitly rather than explicitly.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon (1922), the Supreme Court held that a government regulation that essentially deprives a property owner of the value of its property is an unconstitutional\u00a0‘taking’ (violating the Fifth Amendment protection of property), and the government must compensate the owner for that loss of value. Again, this is not an automatic ‘strict constructionist’ interpretation of the Constitution, since there is no language in the Constitution which addresses loss of value due to government regulation. However, those most adamant about the ills of \u2018judicial activism\u2019 are generally also those most likely to concur with this holding. In the absence of the judicial activism of the Court in this case, private property rights would have been more, rather than less, vulnerable to government intrusion.<\/p>\n

\u201cBrown v. Board of Education (1954) would certainly rate as an act of judicial activism by the ideological definition of that term currently in vogue. It overturned the Stare Decisis <\/em>of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that segregation was Constitutional (instituting the \u2018separate but equal\u2019 doctrine), holding that \u2018separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.\u2019 Brown essentially launched the Civil Rights\u00a0Movement\u00a0as we know it today (it gave it its first major victory), a movement whose progress would have been at least slower, and possibly undermined altogether, in the absence of this Court decision.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Court also declined to limit Congress\u2019 power to pass The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which used the Commerce Clause to prohibit private owners of commercial establishments from discriminating against potential customers, employees,\u00a0renters, and buyers\u00a0on the basis of race. This could easily be considered \u2018judicial activism by omission,\u2019 without which we would not have Civil Rights laws protecting minorities against the entire range of private discrimination, such as employment discrimination and\u00a0housing discrimination.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the Court established that the state\u2019s failure to provide counsel to an indigent defendant essentially deprived that defendant of his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The literal Constitutional right to counsel is not necessarily a right to be provided<\/em><\/strong> with counsel, at the people’s expense,\u00a0but without interpreting it as such, this fundamental right would be accorded only to those who could afford it, and denied to those who cannot, reducing an essential\u00a0protection of\u00a0individual liberty to a commodity for sale rather than a guarantee to all citizens. In a world without this protection, the poor would receive even less justice than they do today.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s worth noting here, again, that a series of Supreme Court decisions over the last century and a half have incorporated the Bill of Rights into the 14th Amendment Equal Protection clause, allowing those core protections to be applied to state and local governments as well as to the federal government, an act of \u2018judicial activism\u2019 without which states and counties and municipalities and school districts would be largely free to violate the Bill of Rights to whatever extent and in whatever ways they see fit. Hardly a boon to the protection individual liberty.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany other decisions could be included in this list, many other basic liberties that depended on an \u2018activist judiciary.\u2019 But the sampling above illustrates\u00a0some of the ways in which our nation would be a very different, and in many ways far poorer place were it not for the role that the so-called \u2018activist judiciary\u2019 has played in our march toward increased equality of opportunity and rights, and increased protection of individual liberties.<\/p>\n

\u201cFinally,\u201d said the angel, \u201clet\u2019s look at what your country and world would look like without the rise in America of the ‘Administrative State,’ through which to regulate the complex modern economy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout the regulatory agencies that promulgate regulations, conduct hearings and inspections, license facilities, and engage in a complex web of tasks necessary to implement the laws passed by Congress, we would live in a far more insecure and unhealthy environment. Incidents such as the infamous \u2018Love Canal\u2019 toxic waste dump beneath a housing developing, causing an astronomical rise in cancer rates, would be the norm rather than the exception. The manipulation of markets, such as those by Enron which caused the California energy crisis of 2000-2001, would be constant and economically devastating. Confidence in investments would plummet, the economy would contract dramatically, and the financial system near-collapse of 2008 (resulting from underregulated financial markets) would be a constant and continuous event rather than a once-in-a-century crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe\u00a0absence of the\u00a0regulatory structure that has developed since the 1930s, and under the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, would be akin to removing the mortar from\u00a0between the bricks\u00a0of the modern economy. The entire edifice would be less securely bound together,\u00a0more unstable, and more likely to collapse. Those sheltered within it would feel every cold wind that blows through, and storms would whip through it with discomfiting regularity. Market failures would dominate the economy, and health and safety violations would be constant and ubiquitous. Commercial enterprises would know that they could sell toxic and dangerous substances with impunity, recognizing that there is more profit in not paying the costs of avoiding doing so.\u00a0A major, perhaps\u00a0completely dominant, economic\u00a0niche would emerge for those that compete by avoiding such costs, simply changing names and products\u00a0whenever the slow dissemination of information of the health and safety risks make the old\u00a0product unprofitable to produce and sell.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe already underfunded Food and Drug Administration would leave even more\u00a0food and drug\u00a0safety responsibility to the companies that have a vested interest in overlooking foreseeable dangers. The New York Times reported (September 28, 2007) that\u00a0due to defunding, the FDA audits less than 1% of clinical drug trials in the United States. As a direct result\u00a0we have increasing known cases of\u00a0pharmeceutical companies\u00a0fudging results of drug trials, leading to waves of preventable deaths, such as occurred\u00a0with Propulsid (Johnson and Johnson), Bextra and Celbrex (Pfizer), and Vioxx (Merck).<\/p>\n

“Similar stories of the consequences of deregulation and defunding of regulatory agencies can be found in food safety (increasing salmonella and\u00a0E. coli <\/em>contamination, even after companies had been asked to address discovered dangers but simply chose not to, a luxury afforded by underregulation), and product safety (such as children\u2019s toys, imported from China,\u00a0containing lead in seriously toxic quantities, undetected due to underregulation of imports).\u00a0The more we \u2018shrink government\u2019 by reducing regulatory oversight even more than we have already done, the greater the frequency of such incidents will become. In the unregulated paradise that some in America are striving for, life would be, literally, \u2018nastier, more brutish, and shorter,\u2019 for thousands if not millions of children, and families, and innocent people just going about their lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile there are some dysfunctional dynamics that lead to the production of laws that are thousands of pages long (e.g., earmarks, and other porkbarrel spending provisions; and controversial riders designed to piggyback on necessary legislation), the main reason is the complexity of the social institutional landscape that those laws are addressing. And those laws, even with their tens of thousands of pages of qualifications and provisions, don\u2019t even begin to anticipate all contingencies, all unexpected consequences, all complexities that will emerge as the law is implemented. For that reason, regulatory agencies are necessary to implement the laws, to address those complexities, to adapt the execution of the law passed in Congress to the realities of the world to which it will apply.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a very information-intensive enterprise, with an amazing amount of very precise expertise embedded in these organizations, able, for instance,\u00a0to research the precise cancer rates associated with each commercial chemical substance on the market, or incorporated into items on the market; the ways in which these substances move through the\u00a0environment and contaminate human beings; the probabilities of contamination and of contracting associated diseases from contamination; the fatality rates of doing so; the costs of regulation at each level; the balancing of legitimate economic concerns with legitimate health and safety concerns. It is not a process which leaves the public out, but rather one which, by law, includes the public, and invites public input.<\/p>\n

“The same\u00a0kinds of calculations and processes are required to oversee the use of public lands, the\u00a0mining of water from aquifers and of minerals from the Earth, the emissions\u00a0and dumping of toxic substances into the air and water and land; the determination of where to build roads and interstates and how to balance all of the\u00a0concerns and interests involved; the determination of where to allow coal plants and nuclear plants and other installations to be built; the determination of what kinds of safety devices and scrubbers they require; the oversight of all of these protections and provisions without which we would all be dramatically worse off.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur economy has been growing (and continues to grow) in complexity at an accelerating rate. For example, the use of supercomputers programmed with complex algorithms to buy and sell stocks in order to reap gains made in fractions of a second distort the market, caused a freefall several months ago that rattled investors and\u00a0required shutting the stock market down, and creates a competition for locating the computers as close as\u00a0possible\u00a0to the stock market servers in order to receive the information milliseconds before competitors. The market collapse caused by a malfunctioning algorithm resulted in an enduring loss of perhaps billions of dollars to investors, as the market had to creep back up, in a context of diminished investor confidence,\u00a0from the depths to which it had plummeted. We need regulatory agencies equipped with human and material resources capable of keeping up with the tens of thousands of similar demands on them, if we want our market economy to continue to function, and to do so in the interests of\u00a0all rather than at the long-term expense of the many in the short-term interests of the few.<\/p>\n

“Here’s one very compelling objective piece of evidence about the value of that administrative state you are so eager to dismantle:\u00a0Its\u00a0emergence immediately preceded the most dramatic rise in wealth production in the history of the world. That very expensive “big government” administrative state has existed in every single nation on Earth that has ever experienced that dramatic rise in wealth production, both immediately prior\u00a0to\u00a0experiencing it and\u00a0from then on, without exception, and every single prosperous developed modern nation is still characterized by the presence of that very expensive “big government” administrative state today, again, without exception. There is not one single exception, and never has been. While it’s true that you can’t prove a counterfactual (we don’t know what would have happened in its absence), there is not one shred of evidence that any other governmental form is able to facilitate this feat and accommodate its end result. By all available evidence, our wealth, the wealth of each and every one of us, is completely dependent on\u00a0the existence of the administrative state.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, many of the problems that would occur in the absence of such a regulatory structure still occur within it; the poor are still burdened more than the rich by undesirable facilities in their neighborhoods; acquiescence to economic necessity still often triumphs over public health and safety; the interests of corporations still work\u00a0their way through the system, in a variety of\u00a0manners, at the expense of the public without\u00a0always being off-set by a commensurate economic benefit; ‘industry capture’ of regulatory agencies to some extent ‘puts the foxes in charge of the henhouse.’ All of these problems diminish the degree to which our regulatory infrastructure efficiently and effectively does what almost all of us implicitly recognize to be necessary and desirable. But the absence of\u00a0our regulatory infrastructure would erase the performance of that function altogether. The significant shrinkage of it that periodically occurs under Republican administrations almost always results in catastrophic effects, with a regularity that is\u00a0matched only by the public disregard of the repeated lesson.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be sure, throughout this tour of what ‘small government’ would really mean, I have ignored the ways in which a strong centralized federal government, an \u2018activist judiciary,\u2019 and the rise of the administrative state have led to negative rather than positive outcomes for both Americans and the rest of the world (perhaps more the latter than the former, since a strong America has been strong to its own citizens\u2019 advantage; for the most part, only when it incidentally served the interests of American citizens have others in the world benefited from American power. See \u201cDemocracy IN America,\u201d But Not BY America<\/a>). But the danger in America today, the one that most needs remedy, is not an exaggerated belief in the virtues of centralization of\u00a0governmental power and effective\u00a0political coherence, but rather an exaggerated\u00a0belief in\u00a0something that does not and cannot exist in the oversimplistic form imagined, a Liberty Idolatry<\/a>\u00a0that counsels the destruction of the very social foundation which liberty requires for its existence.\u00a0And so that is the imbalance that I have addressed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose poetic aspirations of\u00a0America’s national youth were what defined\u00a0its spirit and channeled its\u00a0energies. They still guide\u00a0and inspire its people\u00a0today. But meeting real responsibilities as they arose is what carved\u00a0that spirit\u00a0into the more-often-than-not admirable world\u00a0citizen and leader, and reliable agent of\u00a0its own people\u2019s interests,\u00a0that\u00a0it has\u00a0become. The world, and the people at home who give\u00a0the federal government\u00a0life and whose lives\u00a0that government in turn\u00a0embues with expanded opportunities, would be poorer for the partial death that some would now impose on this vital vehicle of\u00a0the\u00a0American\u00a0spirit. The demands that the federal government has\u00a0risen to meet were not optional, could not have been disregarded. And idolizing rather than respecting the guidance given by\u00a0America’s founding leaders and documents is an insult to them, and a disservice to those alive today, as well as those who will be alive\u00a0tomorrow.”<\/p>\n

The United States of America was founded to be a progressive nation. As Thomas Jefferson himself wrote:<\/p>\n

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those who would strait-jacket us as a people\u00a0with the ideological\u00a0raiment that exists only in their own shrunken imaginations stand in opposition to this ideal, and to the very\u00a0spirit of this nation. It’s time for George Bailey to\u00a0come home, and bask in the fellowship of a society of people who strive to lift one another up, and help bear one another’s burdens.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards (Opening scene: Angels, represented by twinkling stars,\u00a0are talking about a troubled soul on Earth. They review this soul\u2019s life, and the circumstances that led to its present attempt to kill itself\u2026.) It was conceived\u00a0with great hopes in a simpler time,\u00a0by a variety of generous parents, and a few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[14,30,33,4],"tags":[997,1034,225,620,612,322,966,1033,1039,1042,1040,1037,1038,1005,324,1041,220,1035,988,1036,1032,606,923,1030,1031,221,329,60,926,1026,1000],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1506"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":404135,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506\/revisions\/404135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}