ONE

Posted on: February 11, 2019 at 12:04:21 CT

One
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it.

What’s wrong with that, you ask? Nothing! In fact, it’s superbly accurate and insightful. What puts it onto my “worst” list is who uttered it—Woodrow Wilson, my candidate for Worst President. He said it in September 1912 in New York, just weeks before he was elected with less than 42 percent of the popular vote in a four-way race (against Taft, Roosevelt, and Debs). Given what this “progressive” Machiavellian did during his eight years in office, he either didn’t mean what he said or he didn’t care enough to ever live up to it. Cynical pandering to get votes and then delivering something different ought to be a political sin, but sadly, it’s often taken as a sign that the culprit has “grown in office.”

He locked up dissidents right and left after he signed the Sedition Act of 1918.

Wilson grew government like bacteria in a petri dish. He helped give us the income tax and then took the top marginal rate from 10 percent to more than 70 percent. He played a role in the creation of America’s inflation-and-depression factory known as the Federal Reserve. He regimented the economy with a maze of controls during World War I, which he put us into despite a promise to keep us out of it. He locked up dissidents right and left after he signed the Sedition Act of 1918, making it punishable by imprisonment of up to 20 years for a citizen to simply use “disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language” to describe the federal government or his war policies. He was also a racist, segregationist, eugenicist, and philanderer.

If he ever believed a word from that passage on liberty, he never demonstrated in deed the slightest evidence of it. A wonderful quote sullied by a lousy pol.