Saturday, September 12, 2009

This isn’t about health care. It isn’t about green jobs. It isn’t about bail outs or bonuses or stimuli. And it sure as the devil isn’t about race. It’s about liberty, and liberty is about life.

People create their wealth by labor, intelligence, and their own value judgments. People can redistribute – ie, spend or invest – their wealth as they see fit. They are capable of doing this entirely on their own. They may choose to not support some causes or programs that are favored by folks in the government.

The problem isn’t that The People don’t have the wealth to do something. The problem is that they won’t do it if left to make the decision freely. The folks in government, being certain that their own decision-making ability, or morality, or value structure is superior to that of the folks outside government, feel the need to override the freely-made decisions of the latter.

No government can claim more wealth than the combined, aggregate wealth of its People. Folks in the government can’t create wealth to support their causes because a government produces nothing but force. They can only take wealth from the People and give it to those causes or programs of which they in the government approve. How do they take that wealth? Under threat of force. Try not paying your taxes for a while. Sooner or later, some character with a gun will come to your door and invite you to go with him. Refuse, and you’ll get a better look at that gun.

Things the folks outside government approve of survive on the value judgments of the People. Things the folks in government approve of survive on wealth taken from the People and from the things of which they approve by force of arms.

No government exists as some soulless thing, entire of itself, with its own being. A government is a collection of individual human beings. When someone says the government can do something better than the People, they are really saying that this group of folks over here is smarter than that group over there.

By whose authority does anyone say such a thing? By what omniscience do they say who is smarter? What on earth or under Heaven gives one randomly-selected group of people the right and the power to deprive another group of the right to make their own value judgments? From whence comes this authority for an all-knowing government to say, “My values are superior to your values, so by the power of this gun, I hereby lay claim to the work of your heart and hand in order that I might use it for my own purposes?”

That’s what this is about. That’s why I, like Thomas Jefferson, pledge undying hostility to any form of tyranny over the mind of man.

3 comments:

  1. RebSarge: It would be refreshing if open taxation was all we had to deal with today. Governments around the world have turned to fraud and deception. Fraud as in fostering the idea that a right can be established that grants to one person the services and product of another as in a right to medical care. Ignoring the fact that slave owners claimed a right to a certain standard of living regardless of the impact to the rights of the slaves. Deception as in Central Banks manipulating bits in a computer to create in an instant a mountain of debt to be paid off by future taxes. I would not doubt that the global tax rate will need to rise to 60% for decades to pay off current obligations let alone the promises that politicians the world over are making. Can we avoid a Dollar Collapse and nationalization like Venezuala?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Senator Tom Udall
    110 Hart Senate Office Bldg.
    Washington, DC 20510

    Sir, I come to your mailbox again with a heartfelt plea from the depths of my soul. Please, PLEASE do all you can to stand for the American people and their Constitution against the crushing tide of fascism and dictatorship that is pouring from the White House and the Federal legislature.

    First, please do all you can to secure the defeat of the President’s shameless attempt to load the Supreme Court with another racist, fascist thug. Please help in the effort to prevent Judge Sotomayor from being confirmed.

    Second, please do all you can do secure the defeat of the President’s despicable assault on
    individual rights that is explicit in his health care reform bill. This bill will increase health care cost, not decrease it, and at the same time will reduce, by orders of magnitude, the amount of health care available. It will establish a government edifice with absolute power of life and death over the people. “Think you need heart surgery? You’re too old. Just lay there and die. See how we keep health care cost down? Now you don’t have to worry about paying for surgery.” This plan is worse than anything I can possibly express, and I have a pretty fair vocabulary.

    Third, when the cap and trade bill comes to the House for approval, please fight against it. It is one more block in the wall of absolute dictatorship that the President is attempting to build around this nation.

    The seeds of dreadful hardship, suffering, and even death are encapsulated within each of these three issues. Each of them will give the government authority to commit murder.

    ReplyDelete
  3. UT, you are spot on. Nothing we need to live occurs in usable form in nature. Everything requires some human action. To say that one person has a right to something that another person has created is to make a slave of the latter.

    A right to an education? At whose expense? A right to health care? At whose expense?

    As for the tax rate required to pay it off... whoo! I have no idea. Your 60% is probably low. The terrible tragedy is that these people have no concept of paying the money back, and no intention of doing so under any circumstances.

    They honestly believe that goods and services can be created by the stroke of a pen. How many times have you heard someone say, "It doesn't cost anything; it's government money."

    I am doubtful that we can stop the decline and crash of the USA. I do believe we will be held accountable for trying. Personal belief, there. It motivates me, but may not do much for you, and that's okay.

    Thanks for keeping it real.

    ReplyDelete