by F.R. Duplantier
R.K. Scott served as president of America's Future from 1958 until 1989. For most of those three decades, he was also the author, and voice, of our Behind The Headlines radio commentaries..
"Our system of government is unique," observed R.K. Scott in a Behind The Headlines commentary that was rebroadcast annually for many years. "Unlike most other systems in the world, it recognizes that liberty is not something that government can give or take away -- [because] liberty is a natural human right. Our Constitution was formed not to give liberty to our people but to guarantee it. . . .
"All through the annals of history," Scott continued, "the greatest enemy of freedom always has been government -- Big Government, whether in the form of an aristocracy, an autocracy, a dictatorship, even a so-called democratic government with no checks on its powers. Here we see the sheer genius of the American form of government as set out in our Constitution. It was so devised that, as long as we lived within the letter and the law of the Constitution, the national government in Washington was a severely limited government which could never grow big enough to oppress us. This unique guarantee of our freedom was achieved by the separation and diffusion of the terrible power of government.
"The Constitution authorized the national government to do only certain things which the people individually or the states could not do for themselves, such as dealing with foreign nations and defending us against foreign enemies," R.K. Scott explained. "But even here the Founders of the American Republic were determined that such powers must not be concentrated in one man or group of men. That is why our national government is divided into three separate branches. Other potentially oppressive powers of government were guaranteed by the Constitution to the individual states and to them alone. The Founders understood that each state would be a check on the others. No matter how oppressive one state's government might try to become, it would be held in check by the fact that free Americans could shake its dust from their feet and move to another state.
"Finally," R.K. Scott concluded, "the Constitution retained in the hands of the people themselves certain great powers which neither the national nor state governments could touch without a special grant from the people through the long and painful process of amending the Constitution. The whole purpose of this wonderful pattern of government for a free people was to guarantee that the central government could never become so big or so powerful that it could interfere with the natural human rights of each American."
R.K. Scott recognized that our unique system of government presupposes a complementary economic system, one that shares the political system's respect for the rights of the individual. In America, both the political and the economic realms respect the individual's right to earn his living, and to use the fruits of his labor, as he sees fit.
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