5000 Year Leap by Cleon Skousen

UNDERSTANDING RULERS & PEOPLE’S LAW in AMERICA

Today’s headlines are piled up with so many fantastic promises they give the illusion it really wasn’t a president we elected but a supreme ruler of some form or another. Even an aide to Mr. Obama let slip this amazing blooper the Sunday prior to the swearing-in ceremony: “Mr. Obama will be ready to rule from day one.”

Ready to rule? Be it a slip or not, the declaration went unchallenged and seems to have become the accepted role of the new president. And based on public response to Mr. Obama’s first months in office, too many Americans seem to support the role of “ruler” in spite of the extreme efforts and cautions of the Framers of the Constitution to guarantee it otherwise.

To control the office of president, our Founding Fathers wisely constructed a government ingeniously balanced with three branches of government–Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. This assured that one department could not exercise too much power over another. Each branch was supposed to be “checked” by the others to keep it within constitutional bounds. With that, the founders hoped that America would never become dominated by “rulers” or tyrants as has been the case through our planet’s first 5000-year experience.

Since the beginning, we Americans have been hearty pioneering types, eager to cross mighty oceans in flimsy boats for the promise of freedom. According to our American ancestors and forefathers freedom meant having a “voice” in decisions affecting their lives. That voice has been silenced.

To better understand why so many millions fled, fought and died to escape the tyranny of rulers and ruler’s law by coming to America, let’s take a look at some of my Dad’s words regarding, “Ruler’s Law vs. People’s Law” as found on pages 11-18, of The Five Thousand Year Leap, 2009 edition. The comments below are taken from these pages, but not necessarily in total. After reading this summary, may I please invite you to read the whole section? You will enjoy the more detailed discussion dad provides.

The Founders’ Political Spectrum

Part of the genius of the Founding Fathers was their political spectrum or political frame of reference. It was a yardstick for the measuring of the political power in any particular system of government. They had a much better political yardstick than the one which is generally used today. If the Founders had used the modern yardstick of “Communism on the left” and “Fascism on the right,” they never would have found the balanced center which they were seeking.

It is extremely unfortunate that the writers on political philosophy today have undertaken to measure various issues in terms of political parties instead of political power. No doubt the American Founding Fathers would have considered this modern measuring stick most objectionable, even meaningless.

Today, as we mentioned, it is popular in the classroom as well as the press to refer to “Communism on the left,” and “Fascism on the right.” People and parties are often called “Leftist,” or “Rightist.” The public do not really understand what they are talking about.
Measuring people and issues in terms of political parties has turned out to be philosophically fallacious if not totally misleading. This is because the platforms or positions of political parties are often superficial and structured on shifting sand.

The American Founding Fathers Used a More Accurate Yardstick

Government is defined in the dictionary as “a system of ruling or controlling,” and therefore the American Founders measured political systems in terms of the amount of coercive power or systematic control which a particular system of government exercises over its people. In other words, the yardstick is not political parties, but political power.

Using this type of yardstick, the American Founders considered the two extremes to be anarchy on the one hand, and tyranny on the other. At the one extreme of anarchy there is no government, no law, no systematic control and no governmental power, while at the other extreme there is too much control, too much political oppression, too much government. Or, as the Founders called it, “tyranny.”
The object of the Founders was to discover the “balanced center” between these two extremes. They recognized that under the chaotic confusion of anarchy there is “no law,” whereas at the other extreme the law is totally dominated by the ruling power and is therefore “Ruler’s Law.” What they wanted to establish was a system of “People’s Law,” where the government is kept under the control of the people and political power is maintained at the balanced center with enough government to maintain security, justice, and good order, but not enough government to abuse the people.

The Founders’ political spectrum might be graphically illustrated as follows:

WE WILL CONTINUE THIS DISCUSSION IN Column #2 by Paul Skousen

Tags: Political Spectrum, Skousen

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.