Let the torch of freedom burn.

Welcome to the intersection of Faithham Politics.

Wild Builders live with David Barton and Rick Green.

Today's program is civil stewardship, duties versus rights.

We're going to learn a lot today as we go to the set with

David Barton and the Building on the American Heritage series. Well, David, we all love our

freedom. We love enjoying the blessings of liberty. But with those blessings, there also comes

a burden or a responsibility to do something about it, kind of a, oh, playing your role

to make sure that that freedom is not only something I enjoy, but you get to enjoy it and our next generation gets to enjoy it as well. Our founding fathers who gave us these rights or at least secured them to us, there were rights given by God and the founding father secured them. They said to every right, there is a commensurate duty. So if we have a right to free speech, which we do, we also have the duty to be honest in what we say and be truthful and be accurate. And we've got a right to free speech, but there's a duty that goes with it. We enjoy liberty. We've got a duty to be involved in government to choose the right kind of leaders to find out the right things about leaders when we can cast an informed vote. So if you have the freedom to vote, if you have the freedom to choose your leaders, that means you have a duty to go be informed when you do it. That's exactly right. So with every single right that's out there, there's a duty. And if you don't take the duty side of it, you cannot preserve the rights. It will deteriorate into really anarchy. And what happens is it becomes a licentious kind of a thing. I have the right to do whatever I want. No, you don't. There's a great passage in the Bible where twice we're told that we have the law of liberty. Those two things seem to insomorant liberty. That's freedom from law, isn't it? No. It is law that provides you liberty. When you have the standards and the rule of law,

you have freedom in so many ways. And it's the same way with duty and rights. We have rights.

Those rights are given us by God, and that's really what made America different from other

places. And that's why we had so much more self-government, because we governed ourselves.

If we have a right to be a self-governing nation, we have a duty to be self-governing citizens. So in other words, it's not then just a, like you said, licentiousness. It's not just a freedom to do whatever feels good, sort of this libertarian view that says, just get government out of my life. I can make all my own decisions and do whatever feels good to me. There are parameters. There's boundaries there. Absolutely. And we're told in the Bible about government. Government's instituted and created by God. We're told in First Timothy that God has given laws to regulate the bad guys. And by the way, a lot of the laws that help a society are moral laws. That's why in the common law, which we've had for hundreds of years, the common law lists all these moral behaviors. I mean, if you take the logic that if it's done in private, just between me and whoever, if it's consenting kind of stuff, then it doesn't matter what anybody else thinks. Really? Well, I think embezzlement can be done in private. There's no crime that is limited just to you individually. It affects everyone else. So the libertarian viewpoint, now there's some basis for saying a libertarian view of government is that government should be limited, but you can't exist without government. So you have government, you have a right to have government, but you have a duty to have a restrained, limited government, not a tyrannical government, not an overbearing government. So every right still has a duty that goes with,

and those two things cannot be separated. And when you separate them, you turn from freedom

to anarchy, whether it's individual anarchy or anything else. And that's really what we've

seen the rise of in America. We now have all these anarchist groups that show up to protest whenever

there's economic conferences or whatever. We've seen the rise of things

that we haven't seen in America in a long time. And part of that is we've abandoned a moral

standard. We have a duty to uphold what God has told us were to do, whether it's the Ten Commandments

or anything else. But when we abandon that standard, we really force ourselves to have more

government. I love the way that Robert Winthrop

described this back in the 1840s. Robert Winthrop was the Speaker of the House. He's actually

...