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Show at 5 ! THE AMERICAN WAY V LIKE SO MANY $ ' ROBOTS By Gefirte Peck, V One hundred and sixteen years ago Lord Thomas Babinglon MacCaulay, English historian.es-.sayist historian.es-.sayist and statesman, tersely sum-med sum-med up his conception of an ideal if';. society. In an article which ap-Deared ap-Deared in the Edinburg Review the year 1830, MacCaulay said: WgJ "Our rulers will best promote it. the improvement of the people all by strictly confining themselves it-to their own legitmate duties; by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities vtbPir fair price industry and intel ,tligence their natural reward,! aliidleness and folly their natural punishment; by maintaining , t: peace, by defending property, by diminshing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in' every department of state. Let, c (the government do this - the peo-, s-ple will assuredly do' the rest." I That MacCaulay statement toost aptly describes the kind of 11 government set up here in Amer-fca Amer-fca by the founding Fathers. We 'did pretty well in abiding by this formula for a century and a half.Then, a few years ago some-' some-' tthing slipped; we began to abandon aban-don it bit by bit. MacCaulay said, "Our rulers r 11 will best promote the improve-rnent improve-rnent of the people by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties." Ask your-alkgeif your-alkgeif if that is true of our national government today. Honesty will -compel you to answer that the jJAdminstration and Congress are not confining themselves strictly I to the duties as stipulated by our Constitution and the Bill of Rights. MacCaulay said that government govern-ment should leave "capital to find its most lucrative course." Most certainly that does not apply today in the United States. On the contrary, the various gov-erment gov-erment bureaus are working day and night to discourage the flow of capital into legitimate enterprise. enter-prise. , MacCaulay said that commodities commod-ities should be left to find "their i fair price." Today, we have chaos caused by OP A not allowing commodities com-modities to find "their fair price." We helplessly look on while OPA unsuccessfully tries to flaunt nature and the law of supply and demand, the net re-' re-' suit of which is that black mar-, mar-, kets have been built up in practically prac-tically every commodity and necessity. MacCaulay said that industry and intelligence should be left to find "their natural reward,"and "idleness and folly their natural punishment." Is this true in A-merica A-merica today? No! On the one hand, we find a concerted drive on the part of the bureaucrats to destroy all incentive to the individual to exercise initiative and thrift On. the other hand, we find no penalties for idleness and folly - unemployment benefits ben-efits being paid to idle strikers who foolishly walk off their jobs. MacCaulay said that government govern-ment can best serve the people "by observing strict economy in every department of state." Today, To-day, to cite just one of the many examples of governmental waste, we have hundreds of thousands of government employees, whose services are not needed, who eat at the public trough, further increasing in-creasing the burden of the already al-ready sorely-tried taxpayers. MacCaulay were he alive today, to-day, would be nonplused at the spectacle of a once free, proud and liberty-loving people abandoning aband-oning the precepts and ideologies that enabled our forebears to build the greatest and finest human hu-man society the world has ever known. Almost would he be inclined in-clined to retract, inasfar as America Amer-ica is concerned, what he wrote, also in 1830, in his Southey's Col-loq'.iies: Col-loq'.iies: "Nothing is so galling to a people, peo-ple, not broken in from birth, as a paternal or, in other words, a meddling government which tells them what to read and say and eat and drink and wear." When will this nation awaken to what is happening to it? Or are we irrevocably resigned to having an all-powerful, paternalistic pater-nalistic government regiment us like so many robots? |