The phrase "For the good of [the children, the people, diversity, public health, etc.]" is the beginning of a sentence that almost always ends in tyranny.
Any time a contemporary politician utters a phrase beginning thusly, you can almost be assured whatever is being discussed is most certainly NOT in the interests of the identified party or parties and most definitely in the interests of the politician or their political backers.
Governments, once they are formed, even by people with the purest of intentions, almost always feel the immediacy of protecting themselves from the same forces that created them. Therefore, they look to their own survival and continuance by codifying prohibitions of activities opposing or seeking to abolish them.
A case in point is the Insurrection Act of 1807.
The Insurrection Act of 1807, was signed into law and first invoked in 1808 by President Thomas Jefferson, the same man who wrote the following:
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Doing the math, the Insurrection Act became law a scant and tumultuous thirty-one years after Jefferson wrote those words, and less than 20 years after the Constitution of the United States of America was ratified.
There is no doubt that any government based on the transcendental principles of equality at birth, liberty and justice for all, and unalienable individual rights should construct protections for itself, insuring its continued survival for the purpose of the protection of those principles for the good of the citizens. Any government truly deriving its power through the consent of the governed should be preserved and not be overthrown for “light and transient issues”.
The big question, especially in a government “of the people, by the people and for the people” (as Abe Lincoln noted in the Gettysburg Address), is this: who gets to determine where “light and transient” ends and “a long train of abuses and usurpations” begins?
It is my opinion that government, as a living entity, cannot be trusted to make that decision because government amplifies both the best and worst of people, as John Adams described them, “human passions unbridled by morality and religion”. He noted that America has no Constitution capable of withstanding such forces and that such forces “would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net”, ripping the nation apart in the process.
Among those forces, Adams considered “Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry…”. It is no secret that the messianic zeal of pursuing something thought to be right and good often ends in disaster, doing unspeakable harm to the very people it was intended to benefit - and often vesting collateral damage to others in the process.
C.S. Lewis, the noted Christian apologist, captured this human propensity when he wrote:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Since government, even elective, representative government, is a concentration of people, it is also a concentration of passions - which are often political, transient, and selfish, more focused on power than the good of the people.
For these reasons, government simply cannot be entrusted with its own control and therefore, in matters regarding itself, cannot be allowed to police itself. The phrase “inmates running the asylum” comes to mind.
So, through process of elimination, it falls to the people to decide where the line is drawn between the liberty guaranteed by “Nature and Nature’s God” and the tyranny of a “long train of abuses and usurpations” by any government.
But can the people, subject to the same human fallibilities as those in government, be trusted to make such a determination?
I wish I could say I believe the American people can make such a determination, but I am not confident.
Too many people are ignorant of the philosophical grounding of our nation and have succumbed to the transactional nature of our government. So many are living Bastiat’s definition of government, where everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else, that understanding doing what is right has a cost.
People have come to estimate their own freedom based on the value they receive through obedience to the government without realizing that whatever they receive from government is always deducted from their own liberty.
In governance, as in economics, there is no free lunch. That which is given to someone by government must first be taken from someone by government.
My measurement for the standard of liberty vs. tyranny is ensconced in the Declaration of Independence.
When others take up that same metric, we can begin together to save our Republic and restore liberty and justice for all.