News Release From Conservative Forum of Hawaii http://www.conforhawaii.com/
Restoring true sovereignty to every citizen President Walter Moe announced at the March meeting the “Consent of the Governed Project” of the Conservative Forum, which will restore true sovereignty to every Big Island citizen through two amendments to the County Charter:
"The Conservative Forum for Hawaii announces today a new effort which we are starting that we feel will have universal appeal to all the citizen’s of the Big Island, of all political parties.
This is an effort to restore true sovereignty to all citizens, so each citizen can more effectively be in control of his own life, and establish a precedent for firmly placing power over our lives where it belongs, in the hands of the people themselves and not with just a privileged few.
Although representative government allows for the people to transfer authority and power to their elected officials, such transfer is not absolute. Efficient self-government requires the concentration of decision-making and authority, but efficiency cannot come at the cost of our liberty and freedom.
Lately, elected government officials have taken more and more of our freedoms and liberties away, and forced more and more constraints on us in even the most trivial items of how we live our daily lives. They may do this with the best of intentions, such as that it is for the good of all citizens. However, this approach too easily has progressed to arrogance on the part of our elected officials, who see themselves not as our representatives, but more as enlightened leaders who must force us to live the way they envision our communities and lives should be, who feel they know better than any citizen how best to live. This is both arrogant and insulting. In effect, they are saying that the citizens are too stupid to know what is in their best interest, and that by being elected these officials were given the authority by us to run our lives.
At present, government in different levels of various communities have put restrictions on what type of toilets we can buy, which showerheads, light bulbs, windows, laundry detergents, plastic bags, vending machines with sodas or candy, meals prepared using trans-fats, what kind and amount of toilet paper, smoking inside your own home or car, punitive taxes on designated foods such as hamburgers and French fries and sodas, the display of the American flag…the list is endless and getting worse.
This is happening at every level of government, including our local level.
Recently, our some of our own councilmen have been quoted as saying
- “sometimes it takes a law to change behavior”
- "sometimes I have to be forced to do things that are right, that I don't want to" and that
- the leaders should “take charge, to lead the County, to define policy in the best interests of our island”,
but they never say a word about giving the citizens a voice in these decisions. They don’t want the citizens to be in control, they want only themselves to be in control. This is in actuality a neighbor taking away rights from other neighbors.They are taking away our liberties, our rights to live undisturbed, without our permission, and this has got to stop.
Only we know best how to run our lives, not these elected officials, and we did NOT give them the authority to micro-manage our lives and take away our freedoms and liberties.
With this in mind, the Conservative Forum for Hawaii announce that we will place in circulation petitions for two separate initiatives to change the county Charter so that referendums will now be required, and so require approval from the people themselves, before we surrender our rights for a suggested common good.
These are entitled:
- The Consent of the Governed Act on Rights and
- The Consent of the Governed Act on Taxes
The first deals with the requirement of a referendum before the people surrender any of their rights in the future, as we have just explained why.
The second requires a referendum before the people surrender any of their money to the government, as this is the product of our labor and should not be taken without our permission.
Not only is this the right thing to happen for all citizens of the Big Island, but this may even become a model for all the islands, and for the state as well.
We ask enlightened elective officials to take the moral high ground, do the hard but righteous thing, and come out publicly and support our efforts to restore sovereignty to the people through these initiatives."
See the Full Acts Text : Consent of the Governed Acts