5kYL: Preface

Let me commence in the preface of The 5000 Year Leap (5kYL) as well as the pages preceding the actual text (8th printing, August 2007). In the section, “the Challenge,” Ronald M. Mann explains how the U.S. has “out distanced the world in extending the benefits of inventions and discoveries,” and “have been responsible for more discoveries and inventions than any other nation,” and “have given more dollars in aid and relief than most of the world nations combined.”

A.D.D. Moment:

If you have the version that includes a forward by Glenn Beck please submit your sapience of its contents.

But what in the Constitution mandates this type of exceptionalism? There is not one article in the Constitution that requires innovation. Nor does it require that citizens shall work at all. Our military is not of conscription. Our farmers aren’t required to produce anything more than they deem necessary; only lately have laws been enacted where farmers are actually subsidized for not producing. Yet “we have never suffered famine.”

The settlers of Jamestown were no different from any other human in history and neither are our founding fathers. So what made this Nation different? See, the settlers of Jamestown tried out a communal system at first but later turned to free-enterprise. They got to see the beginning of the sunrise.

Are we unaware/desensitized of the freedom we live today? In the forward Stephen Pratt says he was “functionally illiterate...of the principles and practices of freedom.” Skousen says, “every new generation…seems to feel [the need] to reinvent the sociological wheel.” We know our rights and privileges but not our duties and responsibilities.

Unfortunately, through ignorance and apathy, our freedoms are slowly eroding. One example in the Preface, Skousen’s professor of Constitutional Law would note how Congress was “continually seeking answers to the nation’s ills through remedies…not authorized by the Constitution.” These actions whether devious or not were permitted by citizens too ignorant to realize. This was at the time of the Great Depression (read this), and actions like those persist to this day in all branches of the federal government.