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Show Law Is Force Last November the American people demanded, with an avalanche of votes, far-reaching changes in the current policies, attitudes, and philosophy of their government. It will take courage and vision to support those changes chang-es for if we are to return to our traditional principles of self reliance and individual responsibility there will have to be an end to the reckless federal "give away" policy that has characterized the past 20 years. No longer can the federal government be regarded as a perpetual and limitless limit-less source of "aid" and "relief" and "security" for any group, for any region, for any individual. Anyone can cite the tremendous problems we must deal with the Korean War; the menace of internal and external communism; the still-present threat of more inflation; in-flation; the killing tax burden, and so on down the list. But there is another great underlying problem. It is found in the way we have come to depend on over-grow- j ing government to resolve all our difficulties, to protect us against all the exigencies of life from birth to death and to make more and more of the decisions that we used to make for ourselves. The manner in which this problem is finally solved will decide whether we are to remain a free people, or are to drift farther down the road whose dead-end is servitude and tyranny, and a world in which the individual has neither rights nor dignity, and in which the state alone is important. We have long worked on the theory that a "law" is a magician's wand, a potential source of infinite miracles, The wand is waved, a legislative act is passed, and a goal is reached. That apparently, is what millions of us believe or used to believe. I This is a fallacy that has scarred the pages of history! for centuries. Proud and free peoples have allowed themselves them-selves to become enslaved, and nations have eventually collapsed, because of that philosophy. The people said, in effect, to those who governed them: "Solve all our problems prob-lems with laws." They turned over to government great and oppressive powers of action and decision. Endless books and tracts have been written about this. Some of the best were written long ago. In 1850, for example, ex-ample, a French economist, statesman and author named Frederic Bastiat published a pamphlet called The Law. It is more than a century old now, but the truths it expresses will retain their full validity for centuries to come. Here is an excerpt from it: "Since the law organizes justice, the socialists ask why should not also organize labor, educa tion and religion. "Why should not the law be used for these purposes? Because it could not organize labor, education and religion without destroying justice. We must remember that law is force, and that, consequently, the proper functions of the law cannot lawfully extend beyond the proper functions of force. ... "When the law, by means of its necessary agent, force, imposes upon men a regulation of labor, a method or a subject of education, a religious faith or creed ... It substitutes sub-stitutes the will of the legislator for their own wills; the initiative of the legislator for their own initiatives. When this happens, the people no longer need to discuss, to compare, com-pare, to plan ahead; the law does all this for them. Intelligence Intelli-gence becomes a useless prop for the people; They cease to be men; they lose their personality, their iibertv their property." ' That is the situation we face today. We are lucky we still have the time and the resources to save and strengthen our freedoms and to assert again the great principle that the people are the masters, not the servants of their government. We can turn our backs on the false and deadly concept of the all-powerful state. It will call for will power. It will hurt individuals, states and groups which have been getting easy money from the public till. But the hurts will be as nothing compared to the gains in being free from political dictation. |
