On Society

If you’ve spent time reading the letters of our Founding Fathers, you know how hard it was to form a new government. The debates dragged on for months when a letter took weeks to arrive and showing up in person took even longer. And the people in those debates were not all after the same thing. Some were trying to build a fair government; others were angling for power and control. Worst of all, you could never be sure which was which. The document they produced changed the world in more ways than one. But did they do enough?

Throughout history, people have claimed we should all live in peace and harmony, with one another and with nature. Our Founding Fathers clearly had some of this in their hearts when they built our government: we are all free as long as we don’t infringe on our neighbor’s freedom. Groups like Sovereign Citizens, Marxists, Communists, Libertarians, and spiritual movements proclaim versions of this idea every day. But are they right? Has any society in human history actually lived this way? Imagine a perfect society where everyone cared more about their neighbor’s well-being than their own. How would it function? Who would deal with the one guy who says, “To heck with that, I want my own stuff”? How would you settle a dispute when someone feels he’s doing more for others than they’re doing for him? How would you monitor each individual’s output in order to judge such things?

For anyone who looks at the facts, the answer is obvious: societies like this don’t form, and when people try, they don’t last. For hundreds of years, groups have tried to build them, and they have failed again and again. This, I believe, is where our Founding Fathers fell short. We have freedom of speech, but nothing stops our government and its allies from using propaganda to steer us. We have property rights, but nothing stops our government from taking people’s property and building what it wants in its place. We have judges who are supposed to protect us from these abuses, but there is no real way to remove them from the bench when they violate our rights themselves. We have county and city commissioners who are supposed to serve the public, but instead do whatever brings the county the most money, and we have no clear way to hold them accountable.

I believe the only way to deal with this is to assume that no matter how carefully we think a matter through, someone will find a loophole and use it against everyone else. We cannot start from the premise that everyone is good. We have to start from the premise that anyone might be bad, and then write rules that restrain the bad while leaving the good alone. Our system was built from the opposite assumption. We need to consider new county and city rules that restrict the powers of governing bodies. They are supposed to serve the needs of the community and protect our property and rights, not devise schemes that enrich and enlarge the government at the expense of those who depend on it.

There are too many examples of county governments that served themselves and destroyed their communities in the process. How many of those responsible for destroying Henry County do you think still live there? Who enjoys driving through McDonough anymore, or Stockbridge? Covington, a beautiful town in its own right, is following in their footsteps. Butts County has even hired the guy responsible for Henry to help them do the same to it. The government tells us it’s bringing in big business to benefit the community, yet all we see are more crowded streets, more crowded schools, and the loss of everything we used to love about our hometown. We rarely, if ever, see the benefit.

Everyone should understand that when the Georgia Constitution, the O.C.G.A. statutes, or the Federal Constitution speak about the community; they are not talking about the government for a community; they are talking about the people who make up that community. In a Facebook post, the City of Monticello stated: “The ultimate intent is to sell the Mine Lake property for the best sales price possible for the benefit of the City.” But the City is a corporation that serves itself. Making a profit is not why it was formed. In fact, having large amounts of property or cash is the opposite of its purpose. A government agency or school system with large balances in its checking accounts has stolen that money from its community. We should provide only enough to accomplish whatever goals we’ve decided to give them. A surplus means we gave them too much. We need to start considering rules that prohibit our elected officials from making decisions over a certain threshold without a vote.

We elect the people to these positions to help manage the business of the city or county. This business should be driven by OUR desires, not theirs. If we want a data center, then we should ask for it, and it would be their duty to make it happen. If we wanted the city to pay three times the value of property and take out a 3 million dollar loan to buy it for a water processing plant, we should have been informed of a problem, and we should have discussed how to fix it.

We don’t need the officials deciding on their own to spend that kind of money without an intelligent discussion of the problem and an analysis of possible solutions. As far as I am aware, Mine Lake was purchased by the city for a project that they couldn’t even deliver. After discovering this, the city should have given the community the property back by selling it and returning it to the tax base. Instead, they’ve held onto it for years, tax-exempt, and are now willing to sell to the devil, against the community’s wishes, in order to make a profit for themselves.

However, it is not their fault; we’ve sat back and let this sort of stuff happen without saying a word. Most of us don’t even know the real purpose of government; we assume it has all the power and that we can’t do anything to stop it. This kind of thinking is exactly what we need to stop.

By: Glenn Hancock. I can be reached at glennh@fastmail.com