Americans beware. You are not free. Worse, you are being made more and more a slave each day by the very people who tell you incessantly that you are. In fact, the very word itself, FREEDOM, has become your enemy, as it is bandied about proudly and loudly, and distracting you from the encroaching tyranny all around. The word freedom has replaced the substance of freedom that was your birthright, and that is no more.
Of course, Americans were never completely free, which is expressly why freedom was so long sustained on these shores. Our founders knew what freedom is: The natural, God-created state of man, completely unrestrained by the conventions of other men. They also knew that such pure freedom was never practically experienced, and that if it was, it could never be sustained, because it would naturally and instantly consume itself as the powerful and strong exercise of their will without restraint upon the weak. Pure freedom replaces itself with tyranny, rapidly and violently in a shockingly Darwinian fashion. From the chaos of pure freedom rise despots and kings.
So what our Founders concluded, through study, meditation, and debate, was that for freedom to last and to perpetuate itself, the natural freedom each man is born to must actually be restrained in one, and only one, regard – sort of a Golden Rule of Freedom: The free man must give up his freedom to encroach upon the freedom of other free men.
With that one, minimalistic restraint universally applied, the sum total of the rest of man’s innate freedom would be preserved and man would thrive as never before on the stage of human history. There would be no kings, no despots, no powerful devouring the freedom of others. There would be no restraints on the human potential for invention or self-improvement, and no requirements of either. There would be leaders, sure. People who’s natural talents and aptitudes, which they would be free to nurture and grow in anyway they desired so long as they did not rob other men of the same right, would place them in positions of authority, but that authority would be incredibly limited because the government of free men would, unlike all other governments in history, be controlled by the free men themselves. It would, therefore, be restrained in its power to encroach upon the freedoms of its citizens, just as they were restrained from encroaching upon one another.
The very small exceptions, and in fact the only reason for free men to have government at all, were concluded to be defense (some power had to exist, after all, to enforce the simple mandate of not intruding on the freedom of others) and the “common good,” which did not mean collectivism, but was rather narrowly defined as being the tools necessary for free people to go about the process of being free. Beyond that mandate, government would be forbidden to practice, because to exceed those restraints would by default restrain the freedoms that birthed such a government in the first place. If the government has the right to force people to conform to its will in any areas other than the preservation of freedom, then it is automatically the enemy of freedom. More simply, a government who is not specifically and entirely committed to the preservation of freedom is the very destroyer of freedom.
Of course, if you ask the average American if they are free, they will give a resounding, “Yes!” But look around you. Does the government of the United States concern itself chiefly and exclusively with the preservation of your freedom? Or does it, like all governments everywhere, exist to regulate your freedoms, therefore rendering you un-free, after all? Can a free government tax your income? Moreover, can it tax you more and more the more progress you make in pursuing your freedom? Doesn’t that make freedom a commodity to be purchased, not a right from God? For over one hundred years there was no income tax in this country. Now, some are taxed in excess of 40% just on their income.
What about property? One of the simplest expressions of freedom is the right to own land, but do you own anything in this country? Ownership means you don’t owe anyone anything for what is yours. You possess it outright; you are master of it. But what if you have to pay a “property tax” on it each year to the government? If you have to pay someone each year, a debt that can never, ever, be retired, with the penalty for not paying being that they can take your possession away from you, then who actually owns it, you or them? Aren’t you merely renting it from the true owner, the government? You don’t own your house or your land in this country anymore. Don’t believe it? Miss a payment. The true owner has men with guns and briefcases standing by to rob you of everything you think is yours. In the twenties, men paid the mob for protection from… the mob. Today, you pay Uncle Sam for the same kind of protection.
Oh, but we think we’re free. Why? Because we say that we are. In fact, at the end of he day, most people believe that freedom is primarily our ability to speak out against our government, and to be sure, freedom of speech is a uniquely American right. But at the end of the day, all of our words of protest are merely that, words, if the government already has the power over every other aspect of our lives. In fact, they love for us to talk, because it keeps us distracted from the real losses we endure daily to a ruling elite that our founders would have taken up arms against years ago.
Read the Declaration of Independence sometime. The Revolution was fought over far less. The rulers, which is what they now are, passing laws that rob and regulate men without even bothering to read them first, take and take while we talk and talk and congratulate ourselves on how clever and free we are for it. They take your money to pay off their donors, to enforce their will on others, and to prevent consequences of those who freely tried and freely failed at something because, after all, if someone loses, they may not vote to keep the despots in power. They can force you to behave in the ways they deem appropriate, use the light bulbs they want you to use, watch digital televisions instead of analog ones. They oblige you to buy them favor with foreign powers, many of whom it is their job to defend you from. Now they are even in the process of creating a National Healthcare Law which will make the government responsible for your well-being. Of course, in doing so, it will also make them responsible for everything you do that effects your well being.
Is it cheaper to treat cancer, or use your power to pass law to criminalize smoking or car exhaust? Is it easier to treat obesity, or to use your legal power to regulate what people eat and drink, and when? Is it easier to conceive a cure for consequences, or to prevent behaviors that lead to consequences? And if there are too many doctors in one place, and not enough in another, do you want the market inspiring one to move, or the government with it’s guns and fines telling a man where and when he may work?
Ask yourself, are you free if the government can tell you what to eat, what to drive, how much to exercise, what job to do and where and when, and that owns your land and takes half of your income to fund whatever present and future encroachment into your life and liberty it deems worthy?
Of course, there are those who will call this hyperbole, or worse yet, the rantings of a reactionary. They will tell you this is still the freest country in the world, and they may be right. But our Founders never measured their freedom by the freedoms of others. If they did, there would never have been a revolution because the British were already more free than most anyone on earth. It wasn’t the Middle Ages. The King was bound by writs of law, there was a parliament and courts. Men could gripe about the government in any pub in London with virtual immunity, much less thousands of miles away in Boston or New York. In many ways, the English in the seventeen hundreds were more free than Americans in the twenty-first century. At least they could get on a boat and come here to own a nice plot of land and do as they pleased.
The point is, being more free than some others wasn’t enough for Washington or Jefferson, Adams or Franklin. They would be content with nothing less than a revolutionary expression of the total, natural rights of man. They signed their names, struggled and fought to see freedom on this soil be more than a comparative measurement or a cathartic twig of a word to bite down on while our true freedom is amputated from us.
American freedom is more than a word, and it is more than what we are being left with as this runaway government monster devours what men bled and died to give us. So reactionary it may be, but hyperbole it is not. We are not free, and looking in the mirror telling ourselves we are does nothing to change the fact. To hell with the perpetual chant of freedom that deafens us while they steal what is ours in the night. We must stop being content with the expression, and demand again the right. We must stand up to this despotic, bureaucratic, tyrannous monster and take back the substance of the thing while there is still time or else this great experiment is lost already, and freedom really is nothing more than a word. A word that means YOU ARE NOT FREE.