Tyranny

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.

 

Those who are ready to sacrifice freedom for security ultimately will lose both.

 

I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.

By

 

The Constitution was not written to restrain the citizen's behavior, it was written to restrain the government's behavior.

Rand Paul
 
 
The Founders knew that a democracy would lead to some kind of tyranny. The term democracy appears in none of our Founding documents. Their vision for us was a Republic and limited government.
Walter E. Williams
walterewilliams.com

 

What was to be a relatively innocuous federal government, operating from a defined enumeration of specific grants of power, has become an ever-present and unaccountable force. It is the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. Moreover, with aggrandized police powers, what it does not control directly it bans or mandates by regulation.

 

Government, not the oil industry, is the biggest 'profiteer' from oil. And it uses the tax revenue to expand its own authority at the expense of the individual, as it does with an endless number of other industries - including electric power, coal, lumber, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, aircraft, and agriculture. The Statist's intrusion to the free market is boundless.

 

 

Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.

John Locke

 

The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief.

Aristotle
 

Tyrants preserve themselves by sowing fear and mistrust among the citizens by means of spies, by distracting them with foreign wars, by eliminating men of spirit who might lead a revolution, by humbling the people, and making them incapable of decisive action.

Aristotle
 

They that are discontented under monarchy, call it tyranny; and they that are displeased with aristocracy, call it oligarchy: so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy, call it anarchy, which signifies the want of government; and yet I think no man believes, that want of government, is any new kind of government.

Thomas Hobbes
 

Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace.

James Madison
 

There is nothing wrong with describing Conservatism as protecting the Constitution, protecting all things that limit government. Government is the enemy of liberty. Government should be very restrained.

Ron Paul