The Nanny Government is Unconstitutional

I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan, as proposed by this bill [1887 bill appropriating money to Texas farmers suffering through a catastrophic drought], to indulge a benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds for that purpose.  I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should be constantly enforced that though the people support the Government the Government should not support the people.

President Grover Cleveland, cited by Glenn Beck, Arguing With Idiots, pg.6-7

America Founded on Christian Principles

The general principles, on which the Fathers achieved independence, were the only Principles in which that beautiful Assembly of young Gentlemen could Unite.... And what were these general Principles? I answer, the general Principles of Christianity, in which all these Sects were United: And the general Principles of English and American Liberty, in which all those young Men United, and which had United all Parties in America, in Majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her Independence.

John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813

Conservative Ideology

Conservatives generally favor not only the private ownership of personal property but also of the means of production.  Some refer to such a system as capitalism, though they are using Marxist terminology when they do so.  Generally speaking, they believe that property justly acquired belongs to the owner by right.  If they subscribe to the natural law-nature rights philosophy—not all conservatives do—, they believed that private property is a natural right.  Conservatives usually do not subscribe to the current doctrine of “human rights” because it is a phrase contrived to leave property rights out of the definition of rights.  Conservatives favor freedom of enterprise, though they differ among themselves as to the extent to which it should prevail.  They generally tend to oppose both government intervention in enterprise by regulation and control or government engaging in economic undertakings.  They tend to favor a free market, oppose the exclusion of foreigners from the American market or the granting of monopolies by government.  They differ considerably over the desirability of “antitrust” legislation, but it has bee in effect for so long that it rarely comes up as an issue.

As a rule, conservatives are constitutionalists.  That is, they believe in limited government.  They hold that government is a dangerous instrument, and that it is necessary  to take measures to contain and restrict it.  The American approach to that has been by having written constitutions.  These written constitutions are a contract between the governors and the governed.  Generally, conservatives favor a government of laws and not of men, and that the law for the United States government is the United States Constitution.  Conservatives do not accept out of hand the notion that the Constitution is what the courts say it is, since it is a written document.  They differ somewhat over the extent to which they would accept the view that a written constitution can properly be changed by judicial construction.  Traditionalists, who may be in the Catholic or English tradition, would tend to attach greater significance to court precedents than do conservatives in the Protestant tradition.  The latter tend to view a written constitution as fixed until it is amended by the regular and prescribed process.

Conservatives tend to be individualists.  If the sole issue were the individual versus the collective, as in collectivism, they would be almost invariably individualists.  They accept the primacy of the individual, his first ness and vastness, though most believe that in regard to the rights of the individual these are bounded by the necessities of living in society and of cooperation with others.

Conservatives tend to have the greatest respect and attachment for those organizations and institutions nearest at hand to the individual: the family, the church, the local community, the neighborhood school, the local government, as well as customs, traditions, and ways of doing things rooted in locales and regions.  Not all conservatives, or those who have some affinity for conservatism, will subscribe to this hierarchy of values.  Libertarians and rationalists (those who propose to be governed by reason alone) generally do not.

As a rule, conservatives are not revolutionists, do not favor radical and disruptive change, are not utopians, tend to believe, with Jefferson, that abuses are to be tolerated as long as they are bearable, are not relativists, and tend to believe that in the midst of change there are things that endure or are eternal.  They tend to focus upon the fixities, the unchanging, the underlying order, in contrast to thoroughgoing evolutionists.  They are more favorably disposed toward order, tradition, and authority, to the nature of things, than are Liberals and the like.

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Volume 5: The Welfare State 1929-1985, pg.287-289

The Constitution Is Against Welfare

Ramifications of Roe V. Wade

Today’s quote is quite lengthy, but entirely necessary if the reader is to get the full depth of understanding of the subject.

[The Supreme Court ruling on abortion] is not only arbitrary medically but legally.  The ruling set up an arbitrary absolute by disregarding the intent of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.  Quoting Professor [Joseph P.] Witherspoon:

Thus, the failure of the Court in Roe v. Wade to have examined into the actual purpose and intent of the legislature in framing the fourteenth amendment and the thirteenth amendment to which it was so closely related and supplementary thereof when it was considering the meaning to be assigned to the concept of “person” was a failure to be faithful to the law or to respect the legislature which framed it.  Careful research of the history of these two amendments will demonstrate to any impartial investigator that there is overwhelming evidence supporting the proposition that the principal, actual purpose of their framers was to prevent any court, and especially the Supreme Court of the United States, because of its earlier performance in the Dred Scott case, or any other institution of government, whether legislative or executive, from ever again defining the concept of person so as to exclude any class of human beings from the protection of the Constitution and the safeguards it established for the fundamental rights of human beings, including slaves, peons, Indians, aliens, women, the poor, the aged, criminals, the mentally ill or retarded, and children, including the unborn, from the time of their conception.

Supreme Court Justice White in his dissent to the Court’s action stated, “As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but in my view its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.”  Upon this arbitrary ruling medically and legally, the Supreme Court invalidated the law on this subject of abortion of almost every one of the states in the union.

Further, this arbitrary decision is at complete variance with the past Christian consensus.  In the pagan Roman Empire, abortion was freely practiced, but Christians took a stand against it.  In 314 the Council of Ancyra barred from taking of the Lord’s Supper for ten years all who procured abortions or made drugs to further abortions.  Previously the Synod of Elvira (305-306) had specified excommunication till the deathbed for these offenses.  The arbitrary absolutes of the Supreme Court are accepted against the previous consensus of centuries, as well as against past law.  And (taking abortion as an example) if this arbitrary absolute by law is accepted by most modern people, bred with the concept of no absolutes but rather relativity, why wouldn’t arbitrary absolutes in regard to such matters as authoritarian limitations on freedom be equally accepted as long as they were thought to be sociologically helpful?  We are left with sociological law without any certainty of limitation.  

By the ruling of the Supreme Court, the unborn baby is not counted as a person.  In our day, quite rightly, there has been a hue and cry against some of our ancestors’ cruel viewing of the black slave as a non-person.  This was horrible indeed—an act of hypocrisy as well as cruelty.  But now, by an arbitrary absolute brought in on the humanist flow, millions of unborn babies of every color of skin are equally by law declared non-persons.  Surely this, too, must be seen as an act of hypocrisy.

The door is open.  In regard to the fetus, the courts have arbitrarily separated “aliveness” from “personhood,” and if this is so, why not arbitrarily do the same with the aged?  So the steps move along, and euthanasia may well become increasingly acceptable.  And if so, why not keep alive the bodies of the so-called neo-morts (persons in whom the brain wave is flat) to harvest from them body parts and blood, when the polls show that this has become acceptable to the majority?  Dr. Willard Gaylin (1925- ) discussed this possibility in Harper’s (September 1974) under the title, “Harvesting the Dead.”  Law has become a matter of averages, just as the culture’s sexual mores have become only a matter of averages.  

As the Christian consensus dies, there are not many sociological alternatives.  One possibility is hedonism, in which every man does his own thing.  Trying to build a society on hedonism leads to chaos.  One man can live on a desert island and do as he wishes within the limits of the form of the universe, but as soon as two men live on the island, if they are to live in peace, they cannot both do simply as they please.  …

A second possibility is the absoluteness of the 51-percent vote.  In the days of a more Christian culture, a lone individual with the Bible could judge and warn society, regardless of the majority vote, because there was an absolute by which to judge.  There was an absolute for both morals and law.  Bu to the extent that the Christian consensus is gone, this absolute is gone as a social force.  Let us remember that on the basis of the absoluteness of the 51-percent vote, Hitler was perfectly entitled to do as he wished if he had the popular support.  On this basis, law and morals become a matter of averages.  And on this basis, if the majority vote supported it, it would become “right” to kill the old, the incurably ill, the insane—and other groups could be declared non-persons.  No voice could be raised against it. . . .

Here is a simple but profound rule:  If there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute.

Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, p.221-224 (1976) (emphasis in the original)

Government Should Not Support the People

I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan, as proposed by this bill, to indulge a benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds for that purpose.  I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit.  A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the Government the Government should not support the people.

The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune.  This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated.  Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.


President Grover Cleveland, 1887, in response to a bill appropriating money to Texas farmers suffering a catastrophic drought.  Cited by Glenn Beck in "Arguing With Idiots," p.6-7