{"id":5056,"date":"2013-04-15T07:59:50","date_gmt":"2013-04-15T11:59:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=5056"},"modified":"2013-04-15T07:59:50","modified_gmt":"2013-04-15T11:59:50","slug":"wash-times-the-you-are-the-government-canard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/15\/wash-times-the-you-are-the-government-canard\/","title":{"rendered":"Wash. Times: The ‘You Are the Government’ Canard"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Washington Times<\/a>\"bill<\/a>, April 15, 2013<\/p>\n

BOVARD: The \u2018you are the government\u2019 canard<\/h1>\n

Obama joins predecessors in blaming his overreach on us<\/h2>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

In his continuing campaign to subvert the Second Amendment, President Obama recently unveiled one of the oldest tricks in the demagogue playbook. Speaking in Colorado, he declared that since America is a democracy, people had no reason to fear \u201cthe government is going to come take my guns.\u201d Mr. Obama explained: \u201cThe government is us. These officials are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, many Americans are lulled by such assertions. But almost 200 years ago, Sen. John Taylor, in a book titled \u201cTyranny Unmasked,\u201d warned, \u201cSelf-government is flattered to destroy self-government.\u201d Mr. Obama\u2019s assertions fit a long pattern of presidents invoking democracy to sanction unleashing themselves to do as they please.<\/p>\n

President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1919: \u201cIn the last analysis \u2026 a people are responsible for the acts of their government.\u201d Were \u201cthe people\u201d responsible for Wilson\u2019s promises in 1916 to keep the United States out of Europe\u2019s war or for his 1917 declaration of war against Germany? Were they responsible for Wilson, who had campaigned as a champion of freedom, ramming a Sedition Act through Congress that empowered the feds to imprison anyone who muttered a kind word about the kaiser? Were they responsible for Wilson\u2019s devious dealings with the Prohibition lobby that banned beer across the land?<\/p>\n

President Franklin Roosevelt declared in 1938, \u201cLet us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.\u201d Were all Americans somehow to blame for FDR\u2019s 1937 scheme to pack the Supreme Court with new appointees to rubber-stamp his dictatorial decrees? No, nor was it \u201courselves\u201d that ravaged the nation with the New Deal\u2019s thousands of decrees that decimated Americans\u2019 right to make contracts or use their own property.<\/p>\n

President Clinton declared on Oct. 7, 1996, \u201cThe government is just the people, acting together just the people acting together.\u201d It wasn\u2019t \u201cthe people\u201d who sent in the tanks at Waco, Texas, leaving 80 people dead in their wake. It wasn\u2019t \u201cthe people\u201d who sent U.S. planes to bomb Belgrade and kill scores of Serbian women and children. It wasn\u2019t \u201cthe people\u201d who concocted a scheme to rent out the Lincoln Bedroom for $100,000 per night in campaign contributions.<\/p>\n

If people were actually the government, the Internal Revenue Service would not need to threaten harsh penalties to compel employers to pre-emptively seize the bulk of Americans\u2019 wages and deliver them to the U.S. Treasury. The \u201cpeople equals government\u201d doctrine presumes that the citizen\u2019s unspoken wishes animate each restriction inflicted upon him. However, drivers who exceed speed limits are not \u201cself-ticketed,\u201d and travelers who get accosted by Transportation Security Administration agents at airports are not molesting themselves.<\/p>\n

The notion that \u201cthe people are the government\u201d is one of the biggest slanders that the average citizen will endure in his lifetime. This is the political version of the doctrine of Original Sin: It assumes that a person is born politically damned with the weight of all of the past and future sins of his government upon his head. The notion that \u201cyou are the government\u201d is simply a way to shift the guilt for every crime by the government onto every victim of government.<\/p>\n

Are \u201cthe people\u201d lying to themselves when Mr. Obama repeats his canard that \u201cnearly 40 percent of all gun sales don\u2019t require a background check under current law\u201d? Even The Washington Post has bluntly admitted that the president is deceiving the public with that assertion. Under Mr. Obama\u2019s \u201cgovernment is us\u201d axiom, the president is merely responding to Americans\u2019 unspoken lust for bogus statistics to sanction new restrictions on their ability to defend themselves.<\/p>\n

Mr. Obama assures Americans that they have nothing to fear because \u201cI am constrained \u2026 by a system that our Founders put in place.\u201d Listening to the president, one would think that the United States was reposing in the Golden Age of the Rule of Law. Yet, a few weeks earlier during Sen. Rand Paul\u2019s filibuster, the Obama administration fiercely resisted admitting any limitations on the president\u2019s prerogative to kill Americans based solely on his own decree. The Obama administration continues to claim a right to covertly read Americans\u2019 email without a warrant a brazen violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches.<\/p>\n

If the rulers are above the law, then law becomes a tool of oppression, not a bulwark of the rights of the people. Many Americans were shocked in 1977 when former President Richard Nixon told interviewer David Frost: \u201cWhen the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.\u201d This doctrine, though, seems to have become the unofficial Oval Office motto for the past 20 years. As long as rulers are above the law, citizens have the same type of freedom that slaves had on days when their masters chose not to beat them.<\/p>\n

Mr. Obama is only the latest in a long series of presidents who sought to make Americans complacent about freedom. The more people who assume that democracy automatically protects their rights, the more likely that our political system will self-destruct. Until Mr. Obama commits to scrupulously obey federal law and the Constitution, Americans would be foolhardy to trust him with one iota of additional power. Unfortunately, there is no trigger guard on political ambition.<\/p>\n

James Bovard is the author most recently of a new e-book memoir, \u201cPublic Policy Hooligan<\/a><\/strong>\u201d (Sixth Street Books, 2012).<\/em><\/p>\n

(Thanks to\u00a0\u00a0Linas Garsys<\/a>\u00a0for the excellent artwork).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Washington Times, April 15, 2013 BOVARD: The \u2018you are the government\u2019 canard Obama joins predecessors in blaming his overreach on us by James Bovard In his continuing campaign to subvert the Second Amendment, President Obama recently unveiled one of the oldest tricks in the demagogue playbook. Speaking in Colorado, he declared that since America is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[22,183,72,677,52,184,29,182,49,164,662,27,669,38,123,170,179],"class_list":{"0":"post-5056","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"tag-attention-deficit-democracy","8":"tag-bill","9":"tag-demagoguery","10":"tag-democracy","12":"tag-elective-dictatorship-2","13":"tag-franklin","14":"tag-guns","15":"tag-irs","16":"tag-leviathan","17":"tag-lying","19":"tag-obama","21":"tag-public-policy-hooligan","22":"tag-sovereign-immunity","23":"tag-taxes"},"yoast_head":"\nWash. 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Times: The ‘You Are the Government’ Canard"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/","name":"James Bovard","description":"","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/79550830ad81c14be529a2c37469974f","name":"Jim","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/d95466cfd0934e38803c5035629df727ae4ec1f3f96c6883c05b5c52e2044505?s=96&d=mm&r=r","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/d95466cfd0934e38803c5035629df727ae4ec1f3f96c6883c05b5c52e2044505?s=96&d=mm&r=r","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/d95466cfd0934e38803c5035629df727ae4ec1f3f96c6883c05b5c52e2044505?s=96&d=mm&r=r","caption":"Jim"},"description":"Bovard's homepage is at http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com He can be contacted at jim@jimbovard.com James Bovard is the author of ten books. The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5056"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5067,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056\/revisions\/5067"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}