There is only one lawgiver, and it isn't man! We've wandered far from our founding; we're no longer a free people in spite of being told constantly that we are. We've become a timid, licentious, manipulative, and manipulated people. We've confused power with authority, responsibility with subjugation, license with liberty. Those in positions of power abuse their position and the power that goes with it. Rather than being interdependent with our fellow man, we've become dependent and submissive to lawless bureaucrats""domineering and corrupt people who think nothing of abusing and enslaving their fellow man in the name of ideals and theories advantageous to their power and monetary gain. We no longer own property; we've become a feudal society: all property is "owned" by the elite who ration it to the serfs. There's no private property; we're simply tenants paying rent or caretakers who work it according to the masters' instructions. We've brought this on ourselves by rejecting natural law, ignoring our founding documents, and accepting debauchery as freedom. We've allowed our servants to become our masters.

Ironically, although the nation was already slowly drifting toward a national government, the Civil War, supposedly fought to abolish slavery, was the greatest leap from being freemen to becoming subjects of the federal government. The nation was already at war over slavery; slaves were gaining freedom, though haphazardly, through underground railroads and other movements. In the chaos of the secession movement, states' rights became entangled with the loathing of slavery. Many in the South who despised slavery feared the loss of freedom in the name of saving the union and joined the Confederacy to fight for the sovereignty of the states""not to protect slavery. Lincoln, because of his justifiably intense hatred of slavery, made it a war between the union of the states and the sovereignty of the states and sovereignty lost: the central government became a national government that has consistently gained power and gradually enslaved all the people through social programs, regulations, licenses, fees, permits, fines, and an army of bureaucrats to enforce them.

--Kent Wilkinson

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