9/28/2013, 2:39 pm
At the dawn of the Progressive era, Woodrow Wilson first inaugural address March 4, 1913 [italics mine]:
These are some of the things we ought to do, and not leave the others undone, the old-fashioned, never-to-be-neglected, fundamental safeguarding of property and of individual right. This is the high enterprise of the new day: To lift everything that concerns our life as a Nation to the light that shines from the hearthfire of every man's conscience and vision of the right. It is inconceivable that we should do this as partisans; it is inconceivable we should do it in ignorance of the facts as they are or in blind haste. We shall restore, not destroy. We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be, in the spirit of those who question their own wisdom and seek counsel and knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the excitement of excursions whither they can not tell. Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto.
Wilson's speech is a showcase of how the leviathan that is crushing America began. It began with simply implementing what on the surface sounds perfectly reasonable, the implementation of special laws, different from the "old fashioned" laws (natural law), for the purpose of good sanitation, pure food, and labor laws.
The means by which the Progressives worked was to circumvent "old fashioned" separation of powers and throw out Natural Law and the making of law wherein someone has to actually be harmed, where they go to court, where harm has to be proved with evidence, and the accused faces the accuser. Instead the legislature became a court wherein the legislature decides harm has been done and then meets out punishment and issues dictates for prevention of said harm accordingly. (Imagine the State regulating your behavior so as to prevent you from lying or stealing.) In other words the legislature usurps the Judicial branch and violates the separation of powers. This IS the mechanism by which the Left has gained power. They have usurped the judicial system. It is what the entire Regulatory State is built on.
A hundred years after Wilson's speech we are so used to this system that no one questions the Regulatory State. After all, how can we trust people not to sell us tainted food without special laws?
Western civilization was only able to really thrive and people were only really able to posses their own lives on their own terms holding dear their own beliefs when the hard won lessons against tyranny were learned and implemented. One of the first lessons was that Natural Law prevented tyranny from raising it's ugly head.
Woodrow Wilson and the Progs make tyranny sound so reasonable.
There is no justice without Natural Law.
