Our Threatened Freedom

Does Freedom Work

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 36-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 036

Dictation Name: Vol. C - Part 10 – Does Freedom Work

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Does freedom work? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

One of the important aspects of American history was its intention to establish a country in which the basic governing principle would be freedom.

The Founding Fathers were aware that their beginning was far from perfect. They were unhappy with having to compromise with slavery. They wrote in the abolition of the slave trade, and they expected slavery itself to disappear before too long.

There were other problems of course, and American history has been anything but trouble free. However, the expectation was that problems could best be solved by a free people, rather than by a powerful monarch, ruler, or bureaucracy.

To depend on freedom as the solution can be slow at times. It means that people must learn and apply the answers, rather than having them applied from the top. It means too that evil sometimes lingers longer than we would wish.

However, this reliance on freedom as the basic instrument of government made the United States the envy of the world. Immigrants poured in from all over the world, and they continue to come in, because this seemed to be the land of opportunity because it was the land of freedom.

By World War 1, United States was the envy of the world, and the dream country for many peoples. Travelers found that even in very remote countries and places, people had some knowledge of America as a golden place.

Since then, of course, that dream has tarnished. Our follies have made us unpopular, even hated. Here at home our belief in the governing value of freedom has been steadily replaced by a federal government and its bureaucrats.

Some years ago, Lin Yutang wrote that, before he came to the United States, what it meant to him was Patrick Henry and his great declaration, give me liberty or give me death. On coming to this country, Lin Yutang found that we had now another slogan. Give me security or give me death.

Of course, the ultimate security system is slavery. Freedom did not fail, we failed. Freedom requires work, character and responsibility, whereas a security system requires a slave master and a slave state.

An old American principle was that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. That statement came originally from a famed Irish orator and leader, John Philpot Curran, who in a speech of 1790 said, and I quote, “It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God has given liberty to man is eternal vigilance. Which condition, if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.” Unquote. Few have said it as well as Curran. He was right. The choice is freedom or slavery. Either we make freedom and the work and the responsibility it involves our way of life, or we will have slavery to an all-powerful and totalitarian state.

In more than one country in Europe, various forms of social security are bankrupting the nation while increasing the powers of the state. No politician dares call a halt to this insanity, and these nations stumble from crisis to crisis. Will this soon be said of us?

This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedoms.