It was one of human history's freshest and grandest ideas for a country so vast, a constituted republic in which government was empowered with only specific, limited rule, and any rule not specifically empowered to it by its Constitution, government legally didn't possess.
The revolutionary formula was simple: the more free a nation, the less rules and laws; the more rules and laws tyrannically enforced by government, the less free individuals are. The only federally-enforced laws needed in a nation designed to be free are those which specifically protect the natural individual rights of all; concisely, the declared inalienable rights to life, liberty, and conducting individual business freely without the government inserting itself in the least - unless that transaction, obviously, violates the individual liberty of another.
Alas, even from the start of such a grand political experiment, statists abounded and insisted that certain human beings were not covered by the American declaration and that, in fact, government was needed to protect those tyrannical laws already established which allowed individuals to forcefully deny other individuals their inalienable liberty.
Today, almost 226 years later, those same tyrant-spirits chaperon the rule of the government of the United Socialist State of America, an all-tyrannical nation which rules over every aspect of citizen life, from how much water each individual's toilet is permitted to flush to whom each citizen must do business with - if they wish to legally do any business at all in the USSA.
A statist country now so corrupt that it continues to spy on every one of its own citizens in direct denunciation of the same Constitution which made its original existence possible.
Since Edward Snowden's renown revelations, and the world-wide public backlash his revelations prompted, the USSA's federal government has been in full circle-the-spy-wagons mode, disingenuously deflecting about what they're still doing, and counter-attacking by hitting up tech firms they've also betrayed to allow them even more backdoor accessibility to continue to spy even more invasively upon the entire American public and the rest of the world.
Since Snowden, the world has come to learn some of the seemingly innumerable unconstitutional and backdoor tricks the USSA's Executive branch has maintained tyrannically over the entire American citizenry through a cornucopia of alphabet soup federal agencies, but most infamously identifiable as the CIA and NSA. Like both the Directors of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, the FBI Director serves at the pleasure of the sitting President.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation specifically exists to be the federal law enforcement arm of the federal government, residing under the Executive branch; its role is to enforce existing constitutional law, not lobby or champion imagined or proposed legislation, no matter the individual wishes or political positions of the President who commands them.
Statists, of course, have manned the Bureau since its very inception and the more statists and the higher positions in government they occupy, the less natural liberty every citizen will enjoy. When a statist is in a Director's position placed there at the pleasure of the sitting President, and she or he opts to lobby or champion law instead of strictly upholding and defending the Constitution as she or he swore or affirmed to, it precisely indicates that that Director's mission is directly authorized by the President of the United Socialist State of America.
Director James Comey is currently and steadily running into the brick wall of the backs many US tech firms have turned on the USSA spies since Snowden leaked; they don't intend to cooperate so mindlessly anymore. And, they're going even further: they're building stout encryption into their products so they're never in any possession of any customer data the statists may demand from them, encryption that also foils the spies' ability to eavesdrop, collect, and analyze whenever they desire - legally or not.
Director Comey seems not to be a happy statist at the moment.
Last October at the Brookings Institution, in another one of his scheduled pleas to lobby for USSA spy-accessible backdoors to tech products and keys to their encryption (all under the veil of "national security", of course), Director Comey showed his full-fledged, statist credentials when he revealed his assent to the political assessment of his patron:
As a federal government law enforcement official, the Director swears an oath to protect and defend the Constitution for the United States of America, and the Constitution was ratified to create the very least "law zones" a free nation could have while still remaining civil.
The direct ambition of so many of the framers was that the maturation within individuals of the political ideal of self-government - the reciprocal reverence for every individual's natural right to liberty - would evolve to the point where the foundational concept of the least government is the best government would someday become reality.
The United States of America was born to be a nation where laws over its free citizens were intended to be minimal, and only to address the violations of one individual against another's inherent natural rights; exactly as the Constitution was intended to empower the federal government only with the greatly limited rights it specifically constituted onto it, while also forbidding the federal government any power it did not specifically constitute it.
To the direct detriment of individual liberty, the current President and FBI Director, and virtually (it seems) every other occupier now in positions of the former federal government of the United States of America prove - just like so many of their lemming statist supporters today prove, and just like their statist brethren at the very start of this grand experiment called America proved - statists will eternally insist to rule over man's natural yearning to be free simply because they are the natural enemies of individual liberty itself.
As Thomas Jefferson drew close to death, he realized what an individual liberty-failure the still new nation he helped birth had already become; as Truth came closer to claiming him, he knew the statist in him had only added to its condemning pollution. He knew his hereditary statist belief that some men could be slaves to others was inalienably wrong, and he trembled, truly understanding what eternal grief and harm his own practice of the most base of tyrannies would always cause the nation he otherwise loved so much.
Legend has it that when Ben Franklin was asked as he was leaving Philadelphia's Pennsylvania State House what the delegates to the Convention had produced, he replied:
We haven't kept it; the republic is lost.
When the movement practically begins to remake this nation anew (and that anew movement must come because the statists long ago threw the baby out with the bath water), the two indispensable political principles we must never again waver even an iota from are:
That all men truly are created equal, that every other's individual liberty must be revered before one can freely live his own; and...
That every statist - any individual who favors any sort of force in any way, shape, or form to conform a liberty-revering individual to any other action or ideal not freely his own - is the natural enemy of true human freedom everywhere and, as such, is a cancer upon the human political spirit, a cancer that must be eradicated whenever and wherever statism inevitably employs its tyrannical assault against individual liberty.
It is an exquisitely uncomfortable labor writing words which politically belittle other men whom I personally love as much as I do myself. But I truly believe that liberty is individually endowed by our Creator and that statism is a man-made thing of this world, and that either is a choice all aware men intentionally make.
I choose to revere God's gift of individual liberty as the time draws nigh to water the Tree once more.