A Letter: Freedom American Style

A Letter: Freedom American Style

Thomas Allen

[Editor’s note: The following is a letter written in 1989 to the editor of The Franklin Times.]

    I hope that the amendments cited in Miss Simmons’ article, “Freedom, Our Most Precious Heritage,” was a misprint by the newspaper, and not in her original paper. The correct so-called “civil rights” amendments are the 13th, 14th, and 15th, which were adopted during Reconstruction. The latter two are hardly amendments to cite as expanding freedom considering that they were adopted at the point of bayonets. Such an adoption process is certainly not the substance of civil rights. Also, the legality of the 14th Amendment is highly questionable. The 15th Amendment expanded the franchise to Blacks, not the 24th, which eliminated the payment of taxes as a qualification for voting. [Contrariwise, the payment of a minimum direct tax should be a qualification for voting to assure that the voter is invested in the government.]
    Miss Simmons is correct in claiming that freedom is our most important heritage. However, she makes the common mistake of confusing freedom with voting. After all, the people in the Soviet Union voted. Only a true socialist would claim that they were free. Even the United States show that voting is no guarantor of freedom. The history of voting in the United States shows just the opposite. Freedom has declined as more people have been allowed to vote.
    If anyone doubts that freedom has been lost as more people have been given the vote, let him try to do the following:
    –    teach his children at home without doing it the way that the government approves,
    –    not support government institutions (public schools) that indoctrinate children with an ideology with which he disagrees,
    –    keep children without governmental approval,
    –    will his estate to his child if he never marries a person of a different race,
    –    divide his land among his children as he desires,
    –    use his land contrary to some governmental land use scheme (which has the effect of taking property without compensation),
    –    establish a scholarship fund for White Protestant males,
    –    buy a pistol without the government’s permission,
    –    carry a pistol in his pocket without governmental permission,
    –    put a mobile home on a lot in most towns,
    –    transport large sums of money out of the country without reporting it to the government,
    –    keep his financial affairs private,
    –    apportion representation in a State legislature on some basis other than representation of districts of equal population,
    –    make a living as a barber or doctor without the blessing of a government license,
    –    agree to work for someone for less than a governmentally fixed minimum wage,
    –    operate a business without one or more governmental licenses and permits,
    –    plant and sell more tobacco or wheat than some government bureaucrat allots,
    –    spend the 50 percent, which is five times more than God asks, of his income that the government taxes in the way that he thinks it should be spent.
And the list goes on ad infinitum. [This list was compiled in 1989. Today, the situation is even worse. For example, refusing to bake a cake for a homosexual “wedding” or having fewer rights than a common criminal when flying on a commercial airliner.]
    Our pre-civil rights amendment ancestors, with the obvious exception of slaves, enjoyed these and many more freedoms that we no longer have. As the history of the United States so adequately demonstrates, voting does not guarantee freedom. It does, however, show that after the privilege of voting extends beyond a certain point, it is extended at the cost of freedom. Freedom is no more secure in a democracy than it is in an autocracy or oligarchy.
    Freedom without the right to vote is infinitely preferable to the right to vote without freedom. Freedom is our most precious heritage, as Miss Simmons states, not voting.

Copyright © 1989, 2021 by Thomas C. Allen.

More political articles.