"Cautions Against the Natural Encroachment of Power" 1721

Some have said, that magistrates being accountable to none but God, ought to know no other restraint. But this reasoning is as frivolous as it is wicked; for no good man cares how many punishments and penalties lie in his way to an offence which he does not intend to commit: A man who does not mean to commit murder, is not sorry that murder is punished with death. And as to wicked men, their being accountable to God, whom they do not fear, is no security to use against their folly and malice; and to say that we ought to have no security against them, is to insult common sense, and give the lie to the first law of nature, that of self-preservation. Human reason says, that there is no obedience, no regard due to those rulers, who govern by no rule but their lust. Such men are no rulers; they are outlaws; who, being at defiance with God and man, are protected by no law of God, or of reason. By what precept, moral or divine, are we forbid to kill a wolf, or burn an infected ship? Is it unlawful to prevent wickedness and misery, and to resist the authors of them? Are crimes sanctified by their greatness? And is he who robs a country, and murders ten thousand, less a criminal, then he who steals single guineas, and takes away single lives? Is there any sin in preventing, and restraining, or resisting the greatest sin that can be committed, that of oppressing and destroying mankind by wholesale? Sure there never were such open, such shameless, such selfish impostors, as the advocates for lawless power! It is a damnable sin to oppress them; yet it is a damnable sin to oppose them when they oppress, or gain by oppression of others! When they are hurt themselves ever so little, or but think themselves hurt, they are the loudest of all men in their complaints, and the most outrageous in their behaviour: But when others are plundered, oppressed, and butchered, complaints are sedition; and to seek redress, is damnation. Is not this to be the authors of all wickedness and falsehood?

To conclude: Power, without control, appertains to God alone; and no man ought to be trusted with what no man is equal to. In truth there are so many passions, and inconsistencies, and so much selfishness, belonging to human nature, that we can scarce be too much upon our guard against each other. The only security which we can have that men will be honest, is to make it their interest to be honest; and the best defence which we can have against their being knaves, is to make it terrible to them to be knaves. As there are many men wicked in some stations, who would be innocent in others; the best way is to make wickedness unsafe in any station.

Most of the founders were familiar with these letters or had them in their library.

...such as The Los Angeles Times Editorial Page, which today argued that prosecutions for Bush officials are inappropriate, even though they clearly broke multiple laws, because "they did so as part of a ... response to terrorism."

Right, right. The Reichstag fire principle.

Heck no big deal. Their hearts were in the right place. So what if Al Qaeda operative al-Libi was being interrogated legally by the FBI and told them there was no link between al Qaeda and Iraq; that he was then taken by the CIA and renditioned to Egypt where we outsourced our torture, where he was "interrogated" into falsely confessing that Iraq and Al Qaeda were linked and that this information was then used to convince Colin Powell to give his UN disinfo speech and to sell the American public on one of the most ruinious wars in its history resulting in tens of thousands of US military casualties, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, and what will ulitimately be trillions of dollars spent.

Shucks, they meant well, so let's just move forward and stop looking back. We've got this swell new system of honor based system of gov't where we elect some people every 2 or 4 years and let them do pretty much whatever they want, so long as they promise they mean well. Gee wiz, it's been working great!

Just look how great its working with the bailout.

http://www.prwatch.org/node/8092

Consistent with Congress' intent, we are committed to transparency and oversight in all aspects of the program," said Neel Kashkari, the U.S. Department of Treasury's point man for the $700 billion bailout, back on October 13, 2008. But despite Treasury's promise back then that they would release the figure the government is paying the Bank of New York Mellon (BoNYM) to manage and distribute cash from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), they still have refused to make the information public. A current copy of BoNYM's contract with the government obtained by ProPublica, a public interest journalism group, still has the compensation figures blackened out, as they were two months ago, still keeping taxpayers in the dark about how much they are paying BoNYM to administer the program.

Now we all know that the worst possible thing that could happen would be for this information to become public or for some kind oversight or regulation be involved with accounting for this public expenditure.