Letters from Linden
by JACK LINDEN

“Tax Day” has come and gone but we have seen a lot of crowds, some very small and some fairly large, gather in the commons to protest big government and big taxes. I found it rather amusing that they gathered at “the commons” to protest the government, as they see it, moving toward socialism.

I wonder what they think about the name “the commons.” If they were to check into the origin of the area, they would find that it was rather socialistic. You see, the commons originally was where all the villagers would bring their livestock to be watched while they went out into the fields. It was a way to save manpower and allow the vast majority of the people to work in the fields. The major point was that the commons was the property of all the people. It was set aside by the “government” of the village.

Commons were a carry-over from Medieval Europe and came with the folks that came from Europe. It was a common practice in the colonial period along the eastern seaboard and eventually became the town square after we moved into the township and range structure of describing land. So the folks who were protesting the government were really using a socialistic area to expound on the evils of government.

While many of them were protesting on the commons along the East Coast, there were those out west who were protesting, but they in turn failed to recognize that it was big government that acquired the land on which they were standing. They should be reminded that the land commonly referred to in history as the Northwest Territory was acquired when the colonists won the Revolutionary War. (That war was paid for with borrowed money from several states and the French government).

That acquisition took the United States to only the Mississippi River. The “noble bargain”, as the French Minister Talleyrand described it, was the Louisiana Purchase. I think those who believe that the Constitution allows only what is written will find nothing in it about the acquisition of land. Yet one of their heroes, Thomas Jefferson, was the big government culprit who purchased the territory that went to the Continental Divide.

The Constitution of the United States has been interpreted by every president since George Washington and certainly every Congress. To say that we should only do what is written in the Constitution means that we would basically have to return all the land west of the Mississippi, break up the states that were made from the Northwest Territory, and return all of the territories we currently have. It would also mean that the state of Texas would have to be put on its own, since the Constitution does not mention annexation.

The territory that the “half-governor” governed, Seward’s Folly,  would have to be returned to Russia and they would have all that oil. There would be no commons on which to hold meetings to protest how big the government is or should be.

While those folks were there invoking their First Amendment rights, they would have been denied that as well since those first ten amendments were compromises to get the Constitution ratified. There is much that I am afraid we Americans don’t really understand about the documents by which we are governed. The governor of Texas and other states have invoked the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution but they have not mentioned what is commonly referred to as the “elastic clause” also known as the necessary and proper clause in the powers granted to the Congress.

Many of the protests are out of fear, not out of a constructive debate. Let us say what we want and how to do it and debate that issue. A republic functions best based on compromise, not dogmatism. Let us meet on the “commons.”

jdlinden@satx.rr.com