Originally posted June 19, 2013.
Nial Ferguson, author of “The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die”, writes in today’s Wall Street Journal how in 1883 Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the power of the individual in America. And notes that if Tocqueville was still with us today he would think that France conquered America.- E.J. Smith
Jefferson, Mason, Henry and the founders organized the United States as a states rights first Federal Republic, not a central government-centric democracy. Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote profoundly on the subject.
American presidents since Reagan have governed in total disdain and disregard for the wishes and intent of the founders.- Dick Young
Nial Ferguson writes:
Genius that he was, Tocqueville saw this transformation of America coming.
Toward the end of “Democracy in America” he warned against the government becoming “an immense tutelary power . . . absolute, detailed, regular . . .
cover[ing] [society’s] surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way.”
Tocqueville also foresaw exactly how this regulatory state would suffocate the spirit of free enterprise: “It rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces [the] nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”
If that makes you bleat with frustration, there’s still hope.
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