Forming the 'Leave Me Alone' Party

“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” -Michelle Obama

There is a right not specifically spelled out in the Bill of Rights but implicit in every restriction on the federal government: the right to be left alone. Our nation was founded by individuals seeking relief from overbearing governments and religions. Rugged individualism isn’t merely a conceit of John Wayne movies. It has been and will continue to be a way of life for Americans who believe this nation was founded on the rights of the individual. Not the rights of government.

Yet today we are saddled with the most overbearing, intrusive government in American history, a gang of socialist ideologues who seek to exercise control over every facet of human existence including our food, the education of our children, and our exercise habits. People may argue where this urge to control the lives of others originates, but there can be no doubt that the present administration does not see individual liberties when they look at the constitution. They see the governments’ rights and the subjects’ obligations. They have turned the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights on its ear.

They see individuals only in terms of how much money they can squeeze from each citizen. This government reminds me of Zieffer Meird, the intergalactic slaver from my science fiction comic Nexus. Zieffer captured people, decapitated them, and found a way to keep the heads alive to use as batteries. Obama would like to be Zeiffer Meird. He seeks to silence the individual. Shut up and pay your taxes. The only voices to whom he will listen are groups: the trial lawyers, SEIU, UAW, ACORN, the usual suspects.

Never the individual. Always the group.

Bad news for Pharoah. Most Americans see themselves as individuals, save for those benighted creatures who traded their souls for lifelong government employment. (I except my hard-working sister who has been a devoted climatologist since 1973. We disagree about “climate change.”) Government is the only area with jobs growth and most of those jobs are to facilitate either the collection of taxes or the doling out of pork to special groups under the guise of “stimulus.”

What “progressives” fail to understand is that the reason the United States is the greatest nation on earth is because of individual effort in the private sector. All our wealth, our ability to field armies, deliver disaster relief, build schools and highways comes from money earned in the private sector. Yet these fools continue to grow the public sector like a giant cancer on the shoulders of every American left out of the government gravy train.

So I’m positing a very old party: the Leave Me Alone party. I’m happy to pay taxes if they are reasonable and they go toward legitimate government functions as spelled out in the Constitution and limited in the Bill of Rights. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to be forced to pony up to provide some government drone a luxurious retirement.

The Republicans could become the Leave Me Alone party, but that would require some deep soul-searching on their part. In the meantime, millions of Americans will vote like me, searching for a ray of light in the shit storm of government growth, bureaucracy and parasitism.