1. George Washington: Avoid foreign entanglements
Perhaps no statement by an all-American hero and icon tweaks today’s political leaders more than the suggestion that the U.S. should mind its own business.
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But in his farewell address, President George Washington advised against getting involved in the affairs of other nations needlessly.
Granted, certain world events have made this impossible in our history, but majorities of Americans today might say the father of our country should’ve been listened to regarding our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.
Of course, today, the political religion of Barack Obama, Dick Cheney and most of the political class is that it is America’s moral duty to be involved in other nations’ business wherever it makes sense.
Hell, let’s face it—they really don’t even care if it makes sense.
2. Benjamin Franklin: Those who give up liberty for security will get neither
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Today, whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program—or spying on American citizens—has created a national debate over how much liberty should be sacrificed in the name of security.
Washington’s answer? Give up all of it.
And “trust us.”
3. James Madison: War threatens liberty
The idea that a perpetual war environment threatens individual liberty was a running theme with the Founders. They knew their history.
Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other… No nation could reserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Said Lindsey Graham in 2011, “Free speech is great, but we’re in a war.”
Commenting on NSA spying on American citizens, Obama said last year, “You can’t have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a government.”
And we have chosen. Obama has decided the 4th Amendment doesn’t exist.
4. Patrick Henry: Give me liberty or give me death
This quote is so famous it doesn’t need to be excerpted. It embodies the spirit of the generation who fought and won America’s independence.
When it came to liberty, Patrick Henry did not mess around.
But in 2007, Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama said the following, in a derogatory tone, during his defense of the Patriot Act:
The civil libertarians among us would rather defend the constitution than protect our nation’s security.
This is literally the complete opposite of what Henry said—that if we don’t give up our freedoms were all going to die!
Sessions is not alone in this kind of thinking among the Washington elite.
5. Thomas Jefferson: What Washington said—avoid foreign entanglements
In his first inaugural presidential address, our third president and author of the Declaration of Independence said:
peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none…”
So, Senator Marco Rubio is not down with this. At all.
6. James Madison again—how war leads to tyranny at home
Madison is eminently quotable on these issues, as he was so averse to war and creeping government. This quote has been frequently attributed to Madison:
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
While there is no proof he actually said this, we do know Madison said this in 1787:
The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.
And this in 1798:
Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad.
When a federal judge ruled the NSA’s metadata collection program unconstitutional last year, he specifically cited Madison.
Wrote Logan Beirne at Fox News in December:
A federal district judge ruled on Monday that the National Security Agency program tracking all Americans’ phone calls is “probably unconstitutional.” In Klayman v. Obama, Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held that “such a program infringes on ‘the degree of privacy’ that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.”
Appealing to the nation’s founding ideals, he continues, “the author of our Constitution, James Madison, who cautioned us to beware ‘the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power,’ would be aghast.”
7. Benjamin Franklin again—wars cost money
Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later.
Said Dick Cheney in 2002, “Deficits don’t matter.”
