What it means to be an American

I wanted to elaborate on it and talk a little bit more about what it really means to be an American and what made being an American different than being British or being German or being Spanish. One of the key differences was that in most nations of the world, individuals gradually won freedoms that were granted to them from above by the crown, whereas in the United States it was the opposite. We started with all of our rights. Americans had all of their rights and all of their powers, not given to them by government, but they had them naturally. They were there by birth, as a birthright, a gift from God or from nature, not from government. But then Americans created their government, and they created government by surrendering some of their power, empowering government to do some things. And the government in America did not give us our right. We gave the government its limited power. So in America, the people are the master, the government is the servant. Well, since Americans' rights and liberties come from nature, come from God, then the government can't take them away, because the government didn't give us these rights. We created the government to secure our rights. And that is one of the things that bothers me about when Americans celebrate Independence Day today, because Americans really don't want freedom. What Americans want is free stuff, but free stuff is not freedom. Because when the government gives you something, number one, they take away your choice, because they tell you what you're going to get and how you're going to get it. But when the government gives you something, they must take away something from somebody else. And when the government takes things from people, that diminishes their freedom. The servant is not supposed to steal from the master. But that is exactly what happens when the government promises to give somebody something, they must take something away from somebody else. That is not what America is about. You know, we know what the Constitution means, not only because its writing is clear. Today, they say the Constitution needs to be interpreted, right? The Supreme Court is there to interpret the Constitution. The Constitution doesn't need to be interpreted, right? It's not written in Chinese. It's written in plain English. The Constitution needs to be applied. It needs to be enforced. It doesn't need to be interpreted. When people talk about interpreting the Constitution, they really talk about ignoring the Constitution and to impart meaning that doesn't exist, because people who want to interpret the Constitution don't like what it says. And so they want to change the meaning. They want to expand the powers of the James Madison saying the federal government's powers are few, few and defined, and that mainly it is going to be involved in external affairs, right? In war, in peace, in trade negotiations. And that is where taxes, right, are going to be. It says taxes will be associated with these functions. So the government will need taxes in case there's a war to provide for the army. But everything else, everything that has to do with domestic affairs, that's all going to be done by the states. This is what a Madison wrote. They can only do it to pay the debts of the United States and to provide for the common defense and general welfare. That's it. That one little paragraph has been misinterpreted by Supreme Courts to mean that pretty much the government can do whatever it wants. Today they say that, well, the general welfare means anything the government wants to do, it can do. And the general welfare gives the government broad and unlimited powers. Well, how can that be? If the federal government has few powers, how can the general welfare mean that it can do whatever it wants? It doesn't. The general welfare means things that benefit everybody. It is not the specific welfare of an individual or of a region or of a group or of a state. It is something that benefits everybody equally. When the government does something that benefits a particular individual or a particular group, whether it's, let's say, a welfare payment or if it's aid, maybe there's a flood somewhere and they give aid to the flood victims, that doesn't benefit the whole country. It benefits the people who get the aid at the expense of the people who have to pay for that aid. None of that falls under the general welfare. The general welfare meant that they could do whatever they wanted. I mean, what's the point of having the rest of Article 1, Section 8? I mean, why not just say the federal government can do whatever it wants and just leave it at that? What's the point of enumerating these powers? And this is another, this is the final part, and this is another part that the Supreme Court has twisted. This is now the elastic clause that I'm about to read. This little passage, this sentence has done tremendous damage to our country. To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers and other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States or in a department or agency thereof. Now, what that basically means is they have the power to enact laws to be able to do what Article 1, Section 8 says they can do. And that's it. So they have the right to establish a post office. Okay, we see that. So they can enact the laws that are necessary and proper to having a post office. It does not mean that they can do whatever they want. Like the Supreme Court says, this is some kind of elastic clause. Congress can do whatever they feel is necessary and proper. If that was the point, then we wouldn't need to enumerate these powers. We would just say Congress can do whatever it wants. But if Congress could really do whatever it wants, if it can tax however it wanted, if it can spend for whatever reason it wanted, then why would James Madison, the father of the Constitution, say that the federal government's powers are few and defined? According to the current Supreme Court, they're infinite. They're not defined at all. The government can do whatever it wants, which is clear nonsense. There's nothing in here about the government providing health care. There's nothing in here about the government involvement in education. None of this is written here. There's nothing in here about old age pensions. There's nothing in here about programs for the poor, anti-poverty programs. There's nothing in here about emergency aid, about disaster relief. I mean, all the things that the federal government now does are completely unconstitutional. There is no congressional or constitutional authority for any of these expenditures. When the government creates these agencies, departments for housing to guarantee mortgages and to provide mortgages, and to guarantee student loans, none of that stuff is authorized. And again, that is what makes America America. It is the limiting powers of the federal government. We came together as free sovereign people and created a federal government to secure our rights and secure our liberties, and that's it. We didn't create the government to give us anything that we didn't already have. You have all these people now demanding stuff from government, demanding rights. You don't demand rights. What they want are privileges. You know, one of the things that the Constitution says is there'll be no titles of nobility in this country. We didn't want to have anybody to have special privileges. That's what the noble class was, right? They had special privileges that the commoners didn't have. Well, there is no nobility in the United States because no one man is above another. We are all created equal. We all have our inalienable rights of life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness. And it's up to us to pursue happiness. It's not up to the government to bestow it upon us. If you don't have something, you don't look to the government to give it to you. What the government is there to do is to protect what you have naturally, to make sure other people cannot infringe on your rights, that they can't take things away from you, that you are secure in your possessions and your property. But when the government promises to give somebody something, by definition it has to take something away from somebody else. And that is a violation of everything that it means to be an American. And so when we are celebrating the Fourth of July, what we really need to be doing is mourning the death of that nation, the death of liberty, the death of independence. What we have now is dependence. Every American wants to depend on everybody else. This nation is not supposed to be a nation of dependence. It is supposed to be a of rugged individuals, sovereign men and women, whose rights are supreme, who do not bow down to a government master. The government is the servant of the people. And that doesn't mean you send your servant out to steal from your fellow Americans. It means that you respect their rights and their property. It's so unfortunate that we've lost our independence. And why did we lose it? Because we voted it away. Americans were lulled into a false sense of confidence by being promised something from government. And that is what the framers said when they gave us this republic. And again, if you want to look at the Constitution, the Constitution doesn't mention the word democracy. It doesn't mention it once. What it mentions is republic. The Constitution says that the United States shall guarantee to every state in the Union a republican form of government. And that doesn't mean Republicans, Democrats, it means republic. It doesn't mean democracy. But because we became a democracy, when Benjamin Franklin was asked, what have you given us, Mr. Franklin, he said a republic, if you can keep it, because he knew how difficult it was to maintain a republic. America was an experiment in self-government. It was an experiment in allowing the people to create a government of limited power. Unfortunately, we couldn't keep that republic for long. We had the progressive movement, and then we had the New Deal, then we had the Great Society. And now here we are, right? We've lost all the things that the founders feared would happen. Happened. It took a while, but it happened. The government tells us what we can do, what we can do, what we can eat, what we can't eat, what drugs we can take, what drugs we can't take. There's almost nothing in our lives that the government doesn't tell us what we can do. And this is not what it's supposed to be to be an American. Americans are supposed to be sovereign, free individuals deciding for themselves what they're going to do. And if they make a bad decision, well, that's it, right? We have to live with the consequences of our decisions. If we make a good decision, we profit. If we make a bad decision, then we suffer. And we mind our own business. We don't tell our neighbors what to do. We allow people to make their own mistakes. Because you know what? Maybe they're not going to make a mistake. If you think you know better what your neighbors should do, you don't. Most people have a hard enough time doing what's right for themselves, but trying to impose what you believe is right on other people when you don't even bear the consequences if your decisions are wrong. And hopefully one day, America will reclaim its heritage. And we will one day be the free people that the founding fathers intended us to be. And the free people that built the most powerful, the wealthiest country in the history of the world. The middle class was built in America by freedom. It wasn't built by government programs and by handouts and by redistribution. It was built on the foundation of freedom and liberty. The government didn't get involved. These things happened on their own. It was government involvement that slowed down the progress and ultimately reversed it. And the problems that we have today are not a byproduct of the failure of the free market, but of a failure of government to allow the free market and as a failure of the Supreme Court. And so I started off on this podcast by talking about what made it unique to be an American. None of that exists anymore. Thanks to the Supreme Court, thanks to the usurpation of power by the federal government that was specifically denied to it by the Constitution or not authorized to it by the Constitution, we now have an all-powerful federal government that can do whatever the hell it wants. And therefore, there's nothing special about being American. There's nothing now that defines us or makes us different. If we now have a sovereign nation and we simply exist based on the charity of that government, that that government simply claims ownership to everything that we have, they can take all of our money. There's no limit to how much they can tax us. There's no limit to what they can spend our money on. I mean, we have to be grateful for any money they let us keep. And in fact, that's how they look at it. The government basically today in America looks like they own 100% of our paychecks and whatever they let us keep, we should be grateful for the crumbs, right? They own all of our labor. It's like we all live on one gigantic plantation and we're all slaves to the U.S. government. And we have to beg the government for whatever they let us keep, right? This is not the way America was founded. This is not what we're supposed to be honoring when we talk about Independence Day. It is with mixed emotions that I celebrate the 4th of July because I know, I know what this country was. And I know what it should be. And I know what it could be, potentially. But unfortunately, I know what it's become. The nation of the handout. The nation of entitlements. The nation of ask not what you could do for your country, ask what your country can do for you.