Posted by
JDW on Friday, July 27, 2007 10:11:46 PM
The people that fought in the Revolutionary War some of who later would become known as our Founding Fathers wanted to live their lives free from government intrusion. We can get many of their views from the Declaration of Indepedence and constitution. In the later years of the 1700's as they gathered to debate and form our constitution there were 2 different kinds of thought.
Those who supported
Natural law and those who supported
Positivism.
Natural law supporters where those who believes that man received their rights from God and it was the governments responsibility to protect those rights for its citizens .
Positivism supporters are those who believe that the government gives us our rights .
As the constitution was finished I would say that those who believed in Natural law won most of the argument but there were cetain phrases in the constitution that the positivists have used to bring us to where we are now which is a huge federal government that really knows no boundries to its powers in future post I hope to examine how we got from the states creating a federal government to a federal government that takes any power it wants.
Ron Reagan said " We are a nation that has a government not the othee ways around .' That might have been true in 1790 and what was intended but we are not there now.
" We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness: that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
T Jefferson: .
John Adams
If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave.
Alexander Hamilton
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
T Jefferson
THe God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.
James Wilson
Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind.
John Madison
In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example . . . of charters of power granted by liberty. This revolution in the practice of the world, may, with an honest praise, be pronounced the most triumphant epoch of its history, and the most consoling presage of its happiness.