Founders vs. Progressives

Dear editor:

The Founders’ main concern in forming the Constitution was how to give government enough power to carry out its duty but not the ability to accumulate and abuse power at the cost of the “unalienable rights” of the people.

James Madison: “Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties or his possessions.”

Thomas Jefferson: “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.”

John Adams: “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”

History has proven the Founders right.

The Progressives, on the other hand, know that power must necessarily be concentrated in government so that government can control the variables in society, which is required if the Progressives are to “fairly” redistribute the efforts of some for betterment of others. This is the path to egalitarian Utopia.

The Progressives also know that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the primary roadblocks against their Utopian dreams; if Progressives are to achieve their goals, the founding documents and the Founders need to be marginalized. In their hubris, the Progressives believe that their “good intentions” will negate the evil effects of unchecked power.

Woodrow Wilson: “A ( true leader) uses the masses like ( tools). He must inflame their passions with little heed for the facts. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.”

From Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first Inaugural address: “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work … It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by Government itself … by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land … It can be helped by national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities …

“… We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and our property to ( a common) discipline, because it makes possible leadership which aims at the larger good … I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet