How To Become An Expert On Liberty

During the 70s, when a major corporation opened up a plant in our town, they put all prospective employees through pre-hire, a day-long concerted effort to weed out misfits, people who couldn't be team players, and those who wouldn't fit in with assembly line work. They also took this opportunity to catalog those individuals who were innovative and could think for themselves.

One of the sessions included a film titled something along the lines of "Who You Are Now Is Where You Were Then." It showed that all the decisions that we make in the present, all the responses we give to problems and concerns, are directly related to past experiences that we've internalized. The film took the stance that all our actions in the here and now are direct reactions to past events.

I would like to suggest that part of our problems as Americans today is that we've forgotten who and where we were then.

   We've forgotten our past.

         We've forgotten the foundational principles of our country.

                  We've forgotten what it means to be free men and women.

And those in Washington D.C. are counting on that forgetfulness to ram through unconstitutional mandates and usurpations to liberty that affect us on the most basic levels on a daily basis.

For instance, in the wake of the recent Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, we're having a vicious debate on gun control. The issue is extremely polarized. Those who wish for more gun control put forth that one doesn't need certain types of weapons for hunting, sport, and self-defense. Those who believe the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the unreserved right to keep and bear arms point out that the Founding Fathers inserted this clause to prevent the rise of tyranny from our government which always comes about in every country, no matter how free they are upon their founding. The reason for the 2nd Amendment is to defend against the very government which is currently trying to do away with one of the pillars of the Constitution.

While this battle rages, the vice-president of the United States says unequivocally that should negotiations on the issue not go the way the administration wants, they are prepared to rule by executive order.

Let that soak in for a moment.

The vice-president has said that if the government doesn't get the consensus it wants, it will rule by fiat, regardless of the will of the people.

Now, I don't think the folks in Washington are stupid. They too manipulative and coldly calculating to be dumb, and we think them stupid to our own peril.

Are they arrogant? Yes. Elitist? Most definitely. But stupid? Not by a long shot. They are counting on a majority populace too concerned with Dancing With the Stars and their freebies to care what Washington rams through in legislation in the middle of the night. They have precedent for this. It's how we got Obamacare and other liberty-stripping legislation. It's how the Senate has been allowed to operate for over three years without a budget.

In addition, these elitists have had control of the public school system for well over a century. They have been quite adept at infiltrating the highest levels of education in this country and brainwashing successive generations of children into believing that this great experiment in self-government has been an abject failure in the highest moral and physical sense.

They have convinced several generations that there is no transcendent law, that we can spend our way into oblivion and somehow come out, not only with a balanced budget, but a surplus budget, and that the government is the benefactor of all that is good and just in the world and that the average man just doesn't have the intellectual capacity to govern himself.

It is a position of hubris that has no basis in reality, yet they are increasingly successful in everything they do and every position that they put forth. Why is this? It's because the generations here and now don't know their history or the why of the existence of this great country. It's a deliberate attempt at misdirection and revisionist history perpetrated by those in power, as our monthly columnist from Advocates for Academic Freedom rightly points out in many of her columns.

Yet there is one institution that is trying to fight back against the revisionist history and politically correct propaganda being delivered in the public square. Liberty Classroom bills itself as "the history and economics they didn't teach you," and for less than the cost of a movie ticket a month, subscribers have access not just to online classrooms, but to audio links, online message boards, and monthly live sessions with the professors who teach these classes. There are recommend readings, optional quizzes, and even more courses coming soon.

Tom Woods, best-selling author and Liberty Classroom founder, holds a bachelor degree in history from Harvard, and his master in philosophy and doctorate in history from Columbia University. He has assembled a stellar cast of professors of like education and experience to teach these courses, courses like Introduction to Logic, Austrian Economics: Step by Step, U.S. History to 1877, U.S. History since 1877, Western Civilization to 1500, and Western Civilization Since 1500. Under each course title are dozens of lectures available to students to listen to at their leisure, whether online or off.

As a homeschooling aid, these lessons are invaluable. As a supplement to the government indoctrination our students experience in public schools, it's a lifeline of common sense and sanity. As a means to educate and secure the blessings of liberty for our children and our children's children, it's priceless.

We encourage you to go to Liberty Classroom today and look over their site, browse through the courses they offer, enjoy the free samples they provide, and see the caliber of the courses they teach. America is a country unique in history. It was founded upon principles and a faith that no other country has been founded upon. We have been uniquely blessed throughout our history, but we stand on the precipice of losing that blessing.

God's word says that "My people perish for lack of knowledge." That can be applied in the physical and political world, as well as biblically and spiritually. Our country falls because we don't remember who we were when.