AMERICA: THE OWNER'S MANUAL (REFERENCE FREQUENTLY)

PREFACE

BY CINICINNATUS

In such times as these, with an election imminent that promises to unveil a future so terribly unlike our past, it is easy for Americans to lose their way. We have at times seen our country as what she is now rather than what she has always been and what she should be. We are today caught in the confluence of contemporary trends and carried along by its current, heavily buffeted by the rhetoric of two competing ideologies. We have to grab hold of something, and give reason and reflection a precious moment to sink in before we take our country down a path from which it can hardly return without too much self-inflicted harm. In order to understand where our country should go, we of course have to consider where it has been and, most importantly, from whence it came. In this spirit, I offer up the words of our venerated Founders to help us cut through the din and cacophony of electioneering and shameless politics. These are the men who literally made America with their words and blood. They constructed a system of government that is a model for eternal success, a success attested to with its modern-day survival, though it bears the scars and bruises of over two hundred years of tragedy and triumph. The words speak for themselves, and our history is their context. Consider this part of America: The Owner's Manual.

As long as Property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families. As long as Marriage exists, Knowledge, Property and Influence will accumulate in Families.
-John Adams

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
-John Adams

Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.
-John Adams

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
-Thomas Jefferson

Excessive taxation will carry reason & reflection to every man's door, and particularly in the hour of election.
-Thomas Jefferson

Does the government fear us? Or do we fear the government? When the people fear the government, tyranny has found victory. The federal government is our servant, not our master!
-Thomas Jefferson

When once a republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.

-Thomas Jefferson

If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised, to furnish new pretenses for revenues and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without tribute.
-Thomas Paine

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.
-Thomas Paine

The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.
-Thomas Paine

There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation.
-James Madison

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.
-James Madison

A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
-James Madison

America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.
-James Madison

But ambitious encroachments of the federal government, on the authority of the State governments, would not excite the opposition of a single State, or of a few States only. They would be signals of general alarm... But what degree of madness could ever drive the federal government to such an extremity.
-James Madison

I own myself the friend to a very free system of commerce, and hold it as a truth, that commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive and impolitic — it is also a truth, that if industry and labour are left to take their own course, they will generally be directed to those objects which are the most productive, and this in a more certain and direct manner than the wisdom of the most enlightened legislature could point out.
-James Madison

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.
-James Madison

What astonishing changes a few years are capable of producing! I am told that even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror. From thinking proceeds speaking, thence to acting is often but a single step. But how irrevocable and tremendous! What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal & fallacious!
-George Washington

It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it.

-George Washington

I

No country upon earth ever had it more in its power to attain these blessings than United America. Wondrously strange, then, and much to be regretted indeed would it be, were we to neglect the means and to depart from the road which Providence has pointed us to so plainly; I cannot believe it will ever come to pass.
-George Washington