“The Constitution is the like the swimming pool rules.”
—Laura Kuhn

Notwithstanding anti-fun lifeguards who ruthlessly enforce no-running rules, this comment is unfortunately true.

The written law of the land is a dead letter. Its slow and methodical death started in earnest with Abraham Lincoln before being more critically wounded by Franklin Roosevelt. In the eighty years since there has been a steady erosion of its validity by sitting politicians and an increasingly illiterate, disinterested public.

Of course, the war Lincoln waged and won to invalidate Constitutional government and Roosevelt’s socialist policies are now only fodder for argument. What we are living through is the final breath of our rightful form of government as it drowns, abandoned in the deeps first by George Bush and his murderously Republican Congress and now Obama and his band of mathematically-challenged Democrats. Since it is too late to stop the misjudgments of the Bush administration, we should all take acute interest in the policies of the Obama, Pelosi, Reid triumvirate.

With the advent of this administration, coming out of a plainly reactionary election, the final nail of the Constitution’s coffin is being hammered and set. But let’s not be foolish enough to look to Republicans to correct the wrongs being done now anymore than we should expect the Democrats to correct the disgraces of the last eight years. The “Party of Lincoln” had nearly 12 years of congressional control to return our government to its constitutional boundaries. They did the opposite. And it has been decades since the Democrats were aware a document limiting the power and scope of the federal government even exists. Both parties are engaged in little more than a childish game of “king of the hill,” with our money and livelihoods as stake.

Among the founding ideas of our republic we find citizens have a right to private property, a right to security against unlawful search and seizure, a right to keep and bear arms, a right to dissent and a right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Care to challenge the state’s denial of these rights? Put a pistol on your passenger seat and drive through a roadblock with your seat belt off. Then disagree with the cop. You’ll find out just what kind of freedom the stars and stripes stand for. You might even start letting your voice trail off during that line about the home of the free…

The key to understanding how twisted the modern American mindset has become is realizing the people in this country, from the perpetually jobless to the CEO of an insurance giant, expect on some level, to have their “happiness” provided by the state.

So we trade our rightful independence to be cared for. But this is not a function of government. Government’s only duty is to ensure we have the freedom to pursue happiness. To pursue naturally implies both success and failure are possible.

To say some businesses are too big to fail is to deny a natural consequence of any pursuit. Ever been hunting? Fishing? Chasing skirts? Even at ten years-old I understood that in a game of Alligator Charge, I might not catch anyone. I might lose. And fear of that failure made me swim harder.

Failure is a part of life. Economically speaking, to eradicate a business’s right to fail stamps out any inclination or room for up and coming businesses to compete or develop creative solutions in an ever-changing economic context.

Likewise, to dictate that all Americans must purchase insurance is to deny people the right to live free of this drag on our day-to-day, month-to-month livelihood. That may sound weird, but what if you had a lot of money? Would you want to pay a monthly premium, or maybe set up an interest bearing account with enough money in it to handle most medical or automotive mishaps?

What if you simply don’t want insurance?

Individuals should have the right not to pay for it, directly or through taxation, just like private insurance companies should have the right to exist in a free (meaning without government intrusion) market, but it stops being a free market when these companies lobby the government to pass laws forcing citizens to purchase their product.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it give government that authority over us. And nowhere in the Constitution does it give government the authority to dispense insurance, in any form.

The current administration, like the last, has a certain sect of society it seeks to appease. They are the people whose votes put them in office and the big -money executives who donated the cash they needed to reach those people. In this context, the Constitution has little bearing on the decisions being made. After all, it didn’t vote them in. Most citizens don’t even know what it says. That is why we swim at our own risk. That is why we are drowning.

(Editor’s note: Cal Trout is a former South Panola High School teacher whose columns often appear in the Charleston Sun-Sentinel. He shares these thoughts on the U. S. Constitution in honor of Constitution Day, September 17.)