Where did we start to go wrong?
By David Wilder – November 23, 2024
Chapter One
A college friend once complained about some things happening in our local church. Her frustration, well founded or not, forced her to exclaim the only way to ‘get things right’ was to start her own church. After briefly pondering that scenario, she realized…’then someone would join and ruin the whole thing!’.
That sums up our human condition pretty succinctly. Each of us individually juggles the pros and cons of thousands of decisions. Each may contain moral, financial, and emotional elements. We know from experience that these various components of decision making often war against each other. Now throw a few people together to make a group decision and the conflicts naturally compound since each comes with their own priorities on each of these elements. More variables, greater chaos.
In early colonial days, two centers defined what was happening in America: Jamestown, and Plymouth. In 1619, a privateer with slaves was returning from the Caribbean. Short on supplies, they traded about 20 slaves for the needed provisions in Jamestown. Those 20 were treated as indentured servants and released after a period of service.
Now contrast this to when a slave ship found itself near Plymouth. The captain of that ship did not get the anticipated welcome. In fact, he was imprisoned. The Plymouth Plantation community pooled resources to fund returning the slaves back to Africa. To understand this, you have to appreciate that Plymouth, unlike Jamestown, was not under contract to be profitable to anyone other than themselves. Their founding was for religious freedom.
To continue in this tragic vein, we have the tumultuous events leading up to the Civil War. The Missouri Compromise in 1820 drew the line between slave and non-slave territories. When the enslaved Dred Scott family lived in a ‘free state’ for four years, he sued for his freedom. The now infamous Dred Scott case ruled that the right to own slaves, then considered a property right, could not be undone.
Knowledgeable, well-educated people were on both sides of this argument. The point to be made is that even the highest ideals can be corrupted when it conflicts with the peoples pressing self-interest priorities. I’m not writing to relitigate these past decisions, simply to underscore that voices for liberty are not lessened by failures to achieve it. To use my friend’s church scenario, somebody is always joining and messing things up.
Slavery was a doozy of a screw-up for those that were espousing it is self-evident that all men are created equal.
There was a high price to be paid for these errors, as there always is. One would hope that this flaw in our human nature was once-and-for-all purged from our national thinking. One would hope seeking personal gain versus universal gain, or what was called the ‘common good’, would have been suppressed. If only.
Slavery may be the most obvious and grievous example of American errors, but human nature is at work in all facets of governance. Another great example of the Supreme Court making a supremely stupid decision can be found in Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942).
Roscoe Curtiss Filbrun
In 1938, to stabilize wheat market prices, a law was passed to limit how much wheat could be grown. An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, produced more that allowed under this law. This caused him to pay a fine, which he objected to. He argued that the wheat he grew was solely for his farm consumption. That being the case, it was outside the federal interstate commerce authority as stated in the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. A Federal district court agreed, but the government appealed to the Supreme Court.
What if a lot of farmers did what Filburn did? That’s a lot of home-grown wheat that would (potentially) compete with commercial wheat. That would affect commerce, right? This ‘maybe’, ‘could have’, ‘possible’ argument was good enough to win. This landmark case allows the Federal government unprecedented and unintended power to control everything. All they have to do is draw a meandering line of logic back to prices, product availability or who knows what.
Where did we go wrong? The Declaration of Independence laid out a revolutionary worldview that went against the principles of every other nation. Is it a failed perspective, or have we failed in adhering to it?
This is Chapter One from the e-book, Surviving Citizenship: Acting to Avoid Tyranny by David Wilder, 2024
