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Here, Jefferson is saying, when a government engages in behavior designed to obscure or deliberately ignore your rights, and when the government becomes the important item which turns you, the individual, into an unimportant item, and that its function is not to serve you but to master you, you not only have a right to get rid of the government, but you have a positive moral duty to get rid of it; put differently, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”5

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I Had a Dream Today, That My Brothers and Sisters Overthrew the Government

Just as it was Thomas Paine’s positive moral duty to organize mass disobedience of unjust laws by spreading the message of independence, individual liberty, and natural rights, and thus to expose the unjust actions of the British government, it is our duty to spread this same message, and expose the unjust actions of the current American government. Most importantly, we must engage in peaceful civil disobedience of those unjust laws. Just think of the world we would be living in today if the American colonists did not fight for independence and disobey the British laws, or if Rosa Parks did not think she had a duty to violate the unjust law which made it illegal for her to sit in the front of the bus, or if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not find it his duty to fight injustice.

Not surprisingly, the right to ignore or disobey an unjust government has been articulated by many powerful American thinkers throughout our history, each responding to a different moment in a long train of abuses. Consider the examples of Henry David Thoreau and Dr. King. As explained by Thoreau, this positive moral duty of civil disobedience to unjust laws comes from the reasoning that if no action is taken by an individual to disobey and change an unjust law or legal system, the individual in turn practically becomes a supporter, an enabler of the unjust law or legal system, and anyone who supports an unjust law or legal system is acting in violation of the morality set forth by the Natural Law.

Dr. King clearly understood the necessity of acting upon the positive moral duty of civil disobedience, and he stated this reason in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where he wrote, “I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” No longer shall Americans sit idly by at home and accept the status quo while injustice surrounds us. It is time to start peacefully fighting the injustice that takes place in our state legislatures as well as in Washington, D.C.

You Say You Want a Revolution

The entire collapse of human liberty we have seen in this book is precisely what happens when unjust laws are enforced by states and obeyed by persons in those states for too long. Since not enough members of society exercise their positive moral duty of civil disobedience, they have allowed this immoral and unjust system of legalized wealth redistribution and theft to go on for so long and grow so large that it has gained so many allies whose dependence on the system for survival has forced them to oppose and resist any true change. This is the precise scenario Paine warned the colonists about in regards to the war for independence, why he urged imminent disobedience to unjust laws.

It is the duty of moral persons to study the ideas espoused by classical liberal philosophers such as John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. We must learn the lessons taught in Common Sense, demanded in the Declaration of Independence, and promised in the Bill of Rights, and we must stop obeying the unjust laws with which the government enslaves. It is time for us to elect new members of Congress who will codify these classical liberal ideals into law, and create a Declaration of Individual Liberty. No longer shall we sit idly by while the shackles of tyranny hold us down. We