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Showing posts from March 13, 2016

We Must Get Back To First Principles!

Dear Reader, The rights of man have been discussed at length by many worthies over several centuries, but I will select one whose impact was in the last decades of the 18th century, one Dr. Joseph Priestley. I choose him as I know him somewhat better than others as a polymath of considerable influence at the time, and who for awhile lived and operated in Birmingham, my home town. He even influenced some of America's well-known names, such as Thomas Jefferson, before and after Priestley himself settled in America to live out his last years. Priestley's fundamental maxim of politics was the need to limit state interference on individual liberty. Yes, his were different times, but the principles of government have, surely, not changed very much in the time since. However, we are lately witness to disturbing efforts in our own fair country to take away a fundamental right of the disabled, which is their right to at least a reasonable level of subsistence support from the St