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Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person’s sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they’re taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment – just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! – an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience – or to fake – a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values – and can be nothing else.”
― Ayn Rand

CHARLES Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was called “perhaps the most central thinker … of the enlightenment” by Robert Wokler. He was such an important influence on America’s founders, particularly his argument that a separation of powers was necessary for liberty to be maintained, that one writer characterized him as the “Ideological co-founder of the American Constitution,” along with John Locke.

Of particular importance for America was his analysis of liberty (including economic liberty), property, and the role of government in a republic. Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.

Liberty consists principally in not being forced. Political liberty consists in security. In a country of liberty, every man who is supposed a free agent ought to be his own governor. The liberty of one citizen is of greater importance to the public than the ease or prosperity of another.

In a well regulated democracy, men are equal only as citizens. In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.

Political liberty is to be found only … when there is no abuse of power. The real wants of the people ought never to give way to the imaginary wants of the state.

A nation may lose its liberties in a day. It is much better to leave trade open than … to restrain the liberty of commerce. Severe and tyrannical government was incompatible with commerce.

Commerce … flies from the places where it is oppressed, and stays where it has liberty to breathe.

When a democracy is founded on commerce, private people may acquire vast riches without corruption of morals. Trade produces … exact justice, opposite to robbery. Commerce … renders every man willing to live on his own property.

When the inhabitants of a state are all free subjects … each man enjoys his property with as much right as the prince. The public good consists in everyone’s having his property … invariably preserved.

Each citizen contributes to the revenues of the State a portion of his property in order that his tenure of the rest may be secure.

Whenever the public good happens to be the matter in question, it is not for the advantage of the public to deprive an individual of his property, or even to retrench the least part of it by a law, or a political regulation.

The state is the association of men, and not men themselves. In a democracy the people are the sovereign.

We cannot give someone else greater power over us than we have ourselves. In an extensive republic … there are trusts too considerable to be placed in any single subject; he has interests of his own; he soon begins to think that he may be happy and glorious, by oppressing his fellow-citizens.

The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. Cut the tree at the bottom and gather the fruit. That is exactly a despotic government. Useless laws weaken the necessary laws. Laws undertake to punish only overt acts.

Montesquieu was one of the most influential political thinkers behind America’s founding in pursuit of the blessings of liberty. Central to that influence was his recognition that those blessings required that “government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another.” But his intellectual legacy is now honored mainly in the breach, with government primarily devoted to transferring resources and power to the politically influential, which forces Americans to constantly fear that government’s power will be employed against them. We need to revive our commitment to that legacy, rather than to developing new and improved means for the state to prey on citizens it was intended to protect.

CHARLES Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was called “perhaps the most central thinker … of the enlightenment” by Robert Wokler. He was such an important influence on America’s founders, particularly his argument that a separation of powers was necessary for liberty to be maintained, that one writer characterized him as the “Ideological co-founder of the American Constitution,” along with John Locke.

Of particular importance for America was his analysis of liberty (including economic liberty), property, and the role of government in a republic. Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.

Liberty consists principally in not being forced. Political liberty consists in security. In a country of liberty, every man who is supposed a free agent ought to be his own governor. The liberty of one citizen is of greater importance to the public than the ease or prosperity of another.

In a well regulated democracy, men are equal only as citizens. In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.

Political liberty is to be found only … when there is no abuse of power. The real wants of the people ought never to give way to the imaginary wants of the state.

A nation may lose its liberties in a day. It is much better to leave trade open than … to restrain the liberty of commerce. Severe and tyrannical government was incompatible with commerce.

Commerce … flies from the places where it is oppressed, and stays where it has liberty to breathe.

When a democracy is founded on commerce, private people may acquire vast riches without corruption of morals. Trade produces … exact justice, opposite to robbery. Commerce … renders every man willing to live on his own property.

When the inhabitants of a state are all free subjects … each man enjoys his property with as much right as the prince. The public good consists in everyone’s having his property … invariably preserved.

Each citizen contributes to the revenues of the State a portion of his property in order that his tenure of the rest may be secure.

Whenever the public good happens to be the matter in question, it is not for the advantage of the public to deprive an individual of his property, or even to retrench the least part of it by a law, or a political regulation.

The state is the association of men, and not men themselves. In a democracy the people are the sovereign.

We cannot give someone else greater power over us than we have ourselves. In an extensive republic … there are trusts too considerable to be placed in any single subject; he has interests of his own; he soon begins to think that he may be happy and glorious, by oppressing his fellow-citizens.

The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. Cut the tree at the bottom and gather the fruit. That is exactly a despotic government. Useless laws weaken the necessary laws. Laws undertake to punish only overt acts.

Montesquieu was one of the most influential political thinkers behind America’s founding in pursuit of the blessings of liberty. Central to that influence was his recognition that those blessings required that “government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another.” But his intellectual legacy is now honored mainly in the breach, with government primarily devoted to transferring resources and power to the politically influential, which forces Americans to constantly fear that government’s power will be employed against them. We need to revive our commitment to that legacy, rather than to developing new and improved means for the state to prey on citizens it was intended to protect.

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EACH July 4th, Americans celebrate the “birthday” of the Declaration of Independence. But little is ever said on August 29th about another birthday—that of John Locke, in 1632, without whom the Declaration of Independence as we know it would not exist. Locke’s 1689 Second Treatise on Government was the origin of so much of the reasoning in our founding document that Richard Henry Lee accused Thomas Jefferson of plagiarizing from him. The Declaration of Independence is based on the concepts of natural law; equal, inalienable rights; strictly limited government; the consent of the governed; and the right to reject a government which has exceeded its just powers. These all connect back to Locke.

“All men are naturally in … a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they see fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man. But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of license: though man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions.… The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it … that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”

“Man … hath by nature a power … to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men. No body has an absolute arbitrary power … to take away the life or property of another … having in the state of nature no arbitrary power over the life, liberty, or possession of another.”

“Their power, in the utmost bounds of it, is limited to the public good of the society. All men by nature are equal … that equal right, that every man hath, to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man.”

“The power of the society, or legislative constituted by them, can never be supposed to extend farther than thecommon good; but is obliged to secure every man’s property. The legislative acts against the trust reposed in them, when they endeavor to invade the property of the subject, and to make themselves, or any part of the community, masters, or arbitrary disposers of the lives, liberties, or fortunes of the people.”

“Every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. Nobody can desire to have me in his absolute power, unless it be to compel me by force to that which is against the right of my freedom. The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom … for liberty is, to be free from restraint and violence from others … a liberty to dispose, and order as he wish, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property.”

“Man … seeks out, and is willing to join in society with others … for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by their general name, property. The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting … and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.”

“For all the power the government has, being only for the good of the society … ought to be exercised by established and promulgated laws; that both the people may know their duty, and be safe and secure within the limits of the law; and the rulers too kept within their bounds, and not be tempted, by the power they have in their hands, to employ it to such purposes, and by such measures as they would not have known, and own not willingly.”

“Political power … can have no other end or measure … but to preserve the members of that society in their lives, liberties, and possessions; and so cannot be an absolute, arbitrary power over their lives and fortunes, which are as much as possible to be preserved. Political power … has its original only from compact and agreement, and the mutual consent of those who make up the community.”

Gary M. Galles, Lines of Liberty

Black politicians, civil rights leaders and their white liberal advocates have little or no interest in doing anything effective to deal with what’s no less than an education crisis among black students. In city after city with large black populations, such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., less than 10% of students test proficient in reading and math. For example, in 2016, in 13 Baltimore high schools, not a single student tested proficient in math. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. Citywide, only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state’s English test. Despite these academic deficiencies, about 70% of the students graduate and are conferred a high school diploma.

Ballou High School is in Washington, D.C. Five percent of its students test proficient in reading and 1% test proficient in math. In 2017, all 189 students in Ballou High School’s senior class applied to college. All 189 members of the graduating class of 2017 were accepted to universities. In November 2017, an investigation showed that half of Ballou’s 2017 graduates had more than three months of unexcused absences. One in five of the graduating class was absent more than present, therefore missing more than 90 days of school.

Examples of academic underachievement can be seen at predominantly black public schools across the nation, but that’s only part of the story. The strangest part of this is that poor academic performance is accepted and tolerated by black politicians, civil rights organizations and white liberals. Poor performance is often blamed on finances; however, the poorest performing schools have the highest per pupil spending. New York, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore rank among the nation’s highest in per pupil educational spending.

The underachievement story is compounded by the gross dishonesty of colleges that admit many of these students. I cannot imagine that students who are not proficient in reading and math can do real college work. In a futile attempt to make up for 12 years of rotten education, colleges put these students in remedial courses. They also design courses with little or no true academic content. Colleges have their own agendas. They want the money that comes from admitting these students. Also, they want to make their diversity and multiculturalism administrators happy.

Poor black education is not preordained. Dr. Thomas Sowell has examined schools in New York City and student performance on the NY State English Language Arts Test in 2016-17. Thirty percent of Brooklyn’s William Floyd elementary school third graders scored well below proficient in English and language arts, but at Success Academy charter school in the same building, only one did. At William Floyd, 36% were below proficient, with 24% being proficient and none testing above proficient. By contrast, at Success Academy, only 17% of third graders were below proficient, with 70% being proficient and 11% being above proficient. Among Success Academy’s fourth graders, 51% and 43%, respectively, scored proficient and above proficient, while their William Floyd counterparts scored 23% and 6%, respectively. Similar high performance can be found in some other Manhattan charter schools such as KIPP Infinity Middle School.

Liberals tell us that racial integration is a necessary condition for black academic excellence. Public charter schools such as those mentioned above belie that vision. Sowell points out that only 39% of students in all New York state schools who were recently tested scored at the “proficient” level in math, but 100% of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy tested proficient where blacks and Hispanics constitute 90% of the student body.

There’s little question that many charter schools provide superior educational opportunities for black youngsters. The New York Times wrote, “Over 100,000 students in hundreds of the city’s charter schools are doing well on state tests, and tens of thousands of children are on waiting lists for spots.” But here’s New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s take on charter schools, expressing the interests of the education establishment: “Get away from high-stakes testing, get away from charter schools. No federal funding for charter schools.”

Black people cannot afford to buy into any attack on education alternatives. Charter schools across the nation offer a way out of the educational abyss.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at http://www.creators.com.

EACH July 4th, Americans celebrate the “birthday” of the Declaration of Independence. But little is ever said on August 29th about another birthday—that of John Locke, in 1632, without whom the Declaration of Independence as we know it would not exist. Locke’s 1689 Second Treatise on Government was the origin of so much of the reasoning in our founding document that Richard Henry Lee accused Thomas Jefferson of plagiarizing from him. The Declaration of Independence is based on the concepts of natural law; equal, inalienable rights; strictly limited government; the consent of the governed; and the right to reject a government which has exceeded its just powers. These all connect back to Locke.

“All men are naturally in … a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they see fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man. But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of license: though man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions.… The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it … that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”

“Man … hath by nature a power … to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men. No body has an absolute arbitrary power … to take away the life or property of another … having in the state of nature no arbitrary power over the life, liberty, or possession of another.”

“Their power, in the utmost bounds of it, is limited to the public good of the society. All men by nature are equal … that equal right, that every man hath, to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man.”

“The power of the society, or legislative constituted by them, can never be supposed to extend farther than thecommon good; but is obliged to secure every man’s property. The legislative acts against the trust reposed in them, when they endeavor to invade the property of the subject, and to make themselves, or any part of the community, masters, or arbitrary disposers of the lives, liberties, or fortunes of the people.”

“Every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. Nobody can desire to have me in his absolute power, unless it be to compel me by force to that which is against the right of my freedom. The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom … for liberty is, to be free from restraint and violence from others … a liberty to dispose, and order as he wish, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property.”

“Man … seeks out, and is willing to join in society with others … for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by their general name, property. The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting … and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.”

“For all the power the government has, being only for the good of the society … ought to be exercised by established and promulgated laws; that both the people may know their duty, and be safe and secure within the limits of the law; and the rulers too kept within their bounds, and not be tempted, by the power they have in their hands, to employ it to such purposes, and by such measures as they would not have known, and own not willingly.”

“Political power … can have no other end or measure … but to preserve the members of that society in their lives, liberties, and possessions; and so cannot be an absolute, arbitrary power over their lives and fortunes, which are as much as possible to be preserved. Political power … has its original only from compact and agreement, and the mutual consent of those who make up the community.”

Gary M. Galles, Lines of Liberty

Here’s a serious question.  Have we passed that Rubicon in America beyond which it is no longer possible to pretend the American government is legitimately representing the people?  I know that question is on a lot of Americans’ minds these days, and I think it speaks volumes about our brewing crisis that none of our elected leaders has even attempted to acknowledge, let alone address, the growing unease outside the capital.  People are arming up right now in record numbers not because of hunting season; they’re buying weapons because their instincts tell them America is on the brink.  But if America is on the brink, the D.C. Leviathan seems unsympathetic or unaware.  That makes for an awfully dangerous situation.  

Doesn’t it feel as though we’ve been here before?  An out-of-touch capital far removed from American life starts imposing its will on ordinary folk until enough Americans who desire only to be left alone finally dig in their heels, embrace their independent spirits, and refuse to be subjects of an unjust government any longer.  The British Parliament gave us the Stamp Act in 1765 and the Townshend Acts in ’67, and after the Boston Massacre in ’70, the Tea Party in ’73, and the Intolerable Acts of ’74, the tinderbox finally exploded at Lexington and Concord in April of ’75.  Revolution began.  A decade is all it took.  

Ten years ago, millions of furious Americans began protesting the federal government’s suicide pact forced upon the states in the forms of our untenable national debt and the Democrats’ insistence on burdening future generations with even more unfunded liabilities arising from government-run health care and other new entitlements.  “Tea Parties” sprang up across the country to draw attention to the ticking financial time bomb hanging over us all.  Obama mocked them.  The media pretended they were dangerous.  Nobody listened to their pleas.  So they set to work flipping first the House and then the Senate for the Republicans.  When that didn’t work, they voted in an “outsider” president who took both parties by surprise.  

Instead of learning from the moment and recognizing that a significant portion of the electorate had become so fed up with the federal government that it essentially decided to call in a Wild West sheriff to clean house, the self-installed and self-replicating bureaucracy chose instead to sabotage the elected president every step of the way.  Now those same fed up Americans are told they must accept the results of a highly suspicious national election in which the incumbent president won a record number of votes and almost all traditional bellwether counties but came up short against the unprecedented use of mail-in balloting from a handful of Democrat-controlled counties to capture battleground states well after Election Day. 

Americans worked within the system for change, and the system changed the rules under the pretext of a health emergency.  When those Americans protest, their voices are censored, and their livelihoods are threatened.  There is a presumption among Obama Democrats and Big Government Republicans that Americans who take their freedoms seriously will simply roll over and obey if they are increasingly attacked, punished, and ignored.

If “taxation without representation” was enough to boil the blood of American patriots two hundred and fifty years ago, I have my doubts that “socialism without representation” will fare much better with their descendants.

It is the height of irony that an American system of government that arose from rebellion against the unchecked demands of an insular ruling class seems intent on planting the seeds for rebellion once again.  How else can one describe this moment in history when the American government and the American people are heading in different directions?  

According to some polling, less than half the country believes that the election for president was “free and fair.”  Democrat mayors and governors have once again begun flexing powers they do not possess in order to shutter businesses and trample civil liberties in ways that would have seemed unfathomable to Americans not long ago.  And elected Democrats and their supporters in the media and business communities openly make lists of ordinary Americans they deem worthy of harassment and persecution.  These threats to liberty should shock the consciences of true friends of freedom everywhere.

Twenty-five years ago, the witty and prescient Claire Wolfe offered some wisdom that resonated with a lot of people: “America is at that awkward stage,” she wrote.  “It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.”  I’m sure you’ve seen those words, and I’m sure you laughed, but I bet you also wondered when the shooting would actually begin.  An awful lot has happened since then.  Matt Drudge burst onto the scene, shattered the left’s monopoly over journalism for a time, and then joined forces with the left himself.  Republican honchos like Michael Steele and Bill Kristol decided that the best way to protect Republican voters from themselves was to repeatedly stab them in the back, and Fox News created an unbridled outlet for conservative points of view before taking a hard turn toward bend-the-knee, kiss-the-ring champagne socialism.  The great majority of Americans have pleaded for sensible immigration reforms, trade policies that benefit workers at home, and an end to “endless wars,” but the American government has pursued the opposite agenda.  American technology giants emerged to expand the flow of information and the free expression of ideas before transforming into filters of information and suppressors of ideas.  And Big Media, Big Tech, and Big Government conspired repeatedly for four years to remove an American president because he challenged the establishment status quo.  I wonder what stage Ms. Wolfe thinks we’ve entered now.

Perhaps it’s time to follow in the footsteps of the wise generation of men and women who first fought for our freedoms by setting forth our grievances in the kind of formal writing that might make it clear to those who wish to rule over us that our patience has run its course — a declaration, if you will, that states plainly our belief that just power comes only from the consent of those governed.  A free people should expect nothing less.  A government truly “of the people” should insist upon it.

J. B. Shurk

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