That everyone have a comfortable house, be well fed, clothed, and taken care of; have their family about them, and in sickness have the best medical aid available; have a sure and comfortable retreat in old age; and during the whole of life to be free from care, that cancer of the human heart which destroys at least onehalf of the thinking part of mankind.

These are thing we all want; things we often look to our government to provide.

It was not until passing the major part of 66 years that I began to understand the often inverse relationship between freedom and security. It is sort of a zerosum thing. Power given to the government is power lost to the individual citizen.

The relationship is not easy to see. Perhaps that is why we Americans, loving liberty as we do, are too often too ready to give power to the government. I began to look for examples or instances which clarified how security gained is liberty lost.

The words in the first paragraph are not my own. They are a very close paraphrase of Charles Pinckney, speaking in the U.S. House of Representatives. Pinckney was speaking against the Tallmadge Amendment, which would have deprived American citizens of the use and ownership of their personal property.

The citizens in question were those in or planning to move to Missouri. The personal property at issue was their slaves.

When Missouri applied for statehood, James Tallmadge of New York proposed an amendment to prohibit the importation of slaves into the new state and free any slaves already there after the expiration of 25 years.

Representative Pinckney of South Carolina spoke against the ammendment, extolling the many benefits of slavery to the enslaved. His actual words are: “Every slave has a comfortable house, is well fed, clothed, and taken care of ....” You may re-read the entire first paragraph with that beginning.

Pinckney may actually have believed those words when he spoke them. But the bald fact is the slave had scant choice but to accept what care however meager the master provided.

Elected officials and bureaucrats may style themselves “public servants,” and we may believe them. But it is a delusion. When we give over to the government the power to make decisions for us, how to dispose of our time, our wealth, and our labor, we may find ourselves scarcely better positioned than slaves.

Oh, and how did that Tallmadge Amendment work out? The House was in favor of it; the Senate against. Missouri statehood was stalled. In 1820 the northern portion of Massachusetts became the separate free-soil state of Maine. Missouri was admitted without restriction as to slavery, but slavery was prohibited north of 36 deg. 30 min. in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase.