Freedom Worth Dying For, Change Worth Believing In, and the Obama Irony

John Witherspoon was, perhaps, one of the most influential and visionary proponents of the American Revolution, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a tireless contributing architect of the post-revolution government. His 250 year old vision and sense of moral philosophy are not only relevant today, they might well be as critical to a new birth of the American Dream as they were to the original birth in the mid eighteenth century. The idea of freedom was fundamental to Witherspoon’s philosophy. Our young President and the members of Congress should take heed.

Witherspoon was, beginning in 1768, the sixth president and head professor of a small Presbyterian college in Princeton, New Jersey. Yes, that’s the one that flourished into one of the world’s finest universities. I submit Princeton University grew to international prominence singularly from the seeds of John Witherspoon’s leadership. Witherspoon modeled the curriculum on his own alma maters, the University of Edinburgh and the University of St. Andrews. 1 He built on an idea of one of Princeton’s Ulster Scot founders, Samuel Blair, that the curriculum should “cherish a spirit of liberty and free enquiry.” 2 The studies were difficult, to say the least, beginning with a year and a half of Latin and Greek and included “massive doses of reading” of the classics, moral philosophy, and rhetoric and criticism, as well as of the (then) modern philosophers. 3

Particularly striking and, again, relevant today were Witherspoon’s words (circa 1774) in a pastoral letter to all of the Presbyterian churches in the colonies saying that he preferred “war with all its horrors, and even extermination, to slavery riveted on us and our posterity.” 4 The rivets to which he referred were the British Parliament’s policies to tax and regulate the affairs of the American Colonies. For Witherspoon, war, with all its horrors, and even extermination, were better than continued submission to the British government’s policies. Witherspoon equated life under the British rule to slavery and argued for liberty, instead. Did he also inspire Patrick Henry, whose maxim “Give me liberty or give me death” is famous to this day?
Now, the United States is locked in a philosophical battle, much more so than an economic one. The cumulative amount of taxes, the federal debt, and the almost wholly pervasive government regulation of daily lives are, I argue, more oppressive than what the American colonists endured. The current economic difficulties merely illustrate government policies that not only enslave the producers of society with taxes and rules and mammoth debt, but also enslave the vast majority of welfare recipients with the misery of perpetual non-production. The synergy of the two creates an accelerating spiral to moral death, the real crisis in the USA.

And therein lie a couple of staggering ironies. The promised and hoped-for “change we can believe in” has been peddled, but change has not occurred. Oh, President Obama surely is a change from President Bush. But so are the socks I am wearing today a change from the socks I wore yesterday. Believable and sustainable change must be a turn to moral values based on freedom, industry and self-determination, not to massive increases in government subjugation of the rich and the poor.

President Obama is not in the slightest manner attempting to change the immoral philosophy of tax and spend and oppress with unhinged regulation and un-payable debt. Instead, the current administration’s imposition of even more such oppression binds us ever more; it takes away freedom, discourages industry, and supplants self-determination. As a consequence, slavery in the sense verbalized by John Witherspoon is being imposed. And from that springs the biggest irony. Our country’s first President of African descent, as master of the most massive increase of governmental economic and regulatory domination in the country’s history, is enslaving us all for generations to come.

D N Walker
Austin, Texas
March 6, 2009