The Golden Rule, revisited

"O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone; and you have no longer an aristocratical, no longer a democratical spirit. Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all?" --Patrick Henry, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788

Patrick Henry's comments regarding benevolence and arms specifically, but overall regarding power, remind me of the Golden Rule of Arts and Sciences:

He who has the gold makes the rules

or, in the case of our government today, he who makes the rules has the gold.

HERE'S THE POINT:

The government will never change, the Congress will never do their job, the President will not be able to do his job, unless the people have power to punish, to alter or abolish, those in charge who fail to do their job. Such a government will just continue whittling away at rights that are not the government's to infringe until one day we wake up and find all of our rights gone.

Obviously there is little, if any, fear with today's politicians of being re-elected or not, and with the pensions they get they really shouldn't care about losing their job anyway unless they are (1) dedicated servants who stand no chance of losing their job, or (2) otherwise incompetent but power-hungry miscreants who will do anything to keep carving the pork to get their own ham. The choice of the people must be to decide that this phrase must be emphatically re-applied:

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 the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --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.

Remember: rights existed before government. Some governments are established in such a way that they control all rights - monarchy, dictatorship, plutocracy, etc. But, in a republic the people are the government and in our republic we have said that anything not specifically in the Constitution is up to the people, or the states, to control. Further, the Bill of Rights identified certain rights that were definitely NOT to be controlled by the Government - the Bill did not grant any rights at all, it merely lists as sacred certain rights that, again, pre-existed government because all men possess them until they are given away or taken.