Do We Have a Two-Party System in America Today?

Do we have a two-party system in America today?  I think not.  We have one Big Government Party.  It has a Republican wing that prefers war, deficits, assaults on civil liberties, and corporate welfare; and a Democrat wing that prefers war, taxes, assaults on commercial liberties and individual welfare.  Neither wing is devoted to the Constitution, and the members of both wings openly mock it.  Will the Tea Party Republicans be devoured by the Big Government Republicans?  I hope not; but I fear so.

My fear is based on the truism that in America, people go into government in order to utilize its powers to tell others how to live their lives.  Very few persons go into government in order to shrink and to restrain the government.

Government in America today is not logic or reason, it is not fidelity to the Constitution, and it is not compliance with the Rule of Law:  Rather, it is force.  Government today steals liberty and property in the name of safety.  It restricts you ability to express yourself, to defend yourself, to be yourself; and it uses fear to keep people submissive.  Government rejects its moral obligation, insulates itself from litigation, breaks its own laws, makes its own rules, declares worthless paper to be money, and then devalues even that.  Government will not hesitate to use force upon those who challenge it.  Government has made it unlawful to resist its uses of force even when those uses are patently and unconditionally wrong.

However, there are stirrings in the land that enough is enough.  Wise folks are buying guns and gold.  States are blatantly telling the federal government that they simply cannot and shall not obey federal commands that they cannot afford or are not grounded in the Constitution.  Even many police have taken oaths to disobey the orders of their superiors when those orders violate constitutional guarantees.  And many thinking Americans – though apparently not the flying public – have seen through the Federal Government’s false promises of safety though greater control of our daily lives.

The government’s sole moral obligation is to preserve freedom.  And freedom is the unfettered ability to choose to follow your own conscience and free will, not that of someone in the government.  If the government keeps us safe but not free, the government will have become tyrannical and will be as illegitimate as was the government of King George III in 1776.  And it will be time for it to go.

It has been almost 240 years since last we dispatched tyranny from America.  Is that spirit that animated the Founders in 1776 still alive?  Are there those among us who unambiguously declare that liberty trumps safely?  Is life so sweet and peace so dear that we would prefer to live as slaves rather than risk perishing for freedom?