Hillsdale often features prominent speakers at college events, including its Center for Constructive Alternatives (CCA) program. Speakers include Stephen Ambrose, Benazir Bhutto, Russell Kirk, Ralph Nader and Phyllis Schlafly.
In the latest issue of Imprimis, President Larr p. Arnn outlined a platform for the return of Constitutional Government, in remarked delivered on Sept 10th 2010. Here is the outline from his remarks, and offered without comment.
Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.
Outline of a Platform for Constitutional Government
1. Protecting the equal and inalienable rights of individuals is government’s primary responsibility.
a. By rights, America’s founders meant those things naturally belonging to us, and those things earned by our own labor. The protection of rights understood in this way breeds harmony in the society, because each of us claims for himself what he can also give to all others. We may all speak, worship, assemble, and keep our justly earned property without taking from another.
b. Each branch of government is subservient to the Constitution.
c. The federal government has the constitutional duty to ensure that each state maintains a republican form of government. This obligation is strengthened and clarified in the 14th Amendment. It must ensure that no state infringes on the rights or the “privileges or immunities” of citizens. Yet it must also recognize the constitutional standing of state governments.
d. The duties of Congress are clearly delineated in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. It should do no more, lest liberty be endangered. It should do no less, else anarchy ensue.
2. Economic liberty is inversely proportional to governmental intrusion in the lives of citizens.
The platform upon which Abraham Lincoln was elected president stated “that the people justly view with alarm the reckless extravagance which pervades every department of the Federal Government.” It urged “a return to rigid economy and accountability” that “is indispensable to arrest the systematic plunder of the public treasury by favorite partisans. . . .” Likewise today:
a. American economic recovery requires that we liberate the American people to work, to save and to invest, secure in their property, confident about the dollar as a store of value, and sure that the government will be an impartial enforcer of the law and of contracts.
b. In all administration of federal programs we must demand the utmost economy, and that every care be taken to avoid further growth and sprawl in the federal administrative establishment.
c. Our massive public investment in entitlement programs must be protected through privatization programs, which should utilize the real practices of insurance against catastrophe and of savings for future needs. In this process our investment must be safeguarded from loss, as the government must keep its contracts.
d. Sound money is among the most sacred of the federal government’s responsibilities, and price stability should be the aim of monetary policy.
e. The federal government must not subsidize corporations or individuals in its tax code or any other policy.
f. Philanthropy is the natural outgrowth of American principles and institutions. It should be encouraged and relied upon, along with local and state government, as the great engine of social reform and the amelioration of distress.
3. To accomplish its primary duty of protecting individual liberty, the federal government must uphold national security.
a. National defense has been for most of American history the chief undertaking of the government under the Constitution. It has been supplanted by the federal entitlement and regulatory state. This reversal of priority hampers growth at home, deprives the American people of scope for self-government, and undermines the defense of the nation.
b. We should pursue relentlessly every form of defense against foreign threats. Especially is this true in the case of attack by weapons of mass destruction. Therefore missile defense and a vigorous policy to combat Islamic and other forms of terrorism are urgently required.
c. We must overcome all international and domestic efforts to undermine American sovereignty, including those mounted through the United Nations and other international organizations, or through efforts to impose new treaties.
d. Promotion of democracy and defense of innocents abroad should be undertaken only in keeping with the national interest.
4. The restoration of a high standard of public and private morality is essential to the revival of constitutionalism. As the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 states, “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” The Constitution itself says nothing about education, for the same reason it says nothing about families or marriage or child-rearing: the federal government should not control or regulate these things. Parents and teachers, not the federal government, teach children. What they teach them matters most, for without proper moral and civic education a republican form of government will falter. With it, and with a strong defense of our right to religious liberty, republican government can flourish.
We close again with the words of Lincoln, from the same speech with which we began. Quoting the Bible, Lincoln said that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” We shall be governed either by ourselves, under a Constitution, or else we shall be governed by the new kind of master invented in our day, the bureaucrat, and by the impenetrable web of rules that he fabricates and enforces.
Let us stand together against the rule of bureaucracy, and for liberty and the Constitution.
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