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The Forgotten Risks of Liberty: Honoring the Original Patriots

By on July 4, 2013 in Liberty & Freedom, Ruminations, Science & History, US & International Affairs

On this day 237 years ago a midst the heat of a Philadelphia summer, the Continental Congress officially adopted Thomas Jefferson’s beautifully crafted words and Declared Independence from King George and Britain. Americans have celebrated that day ever since as our Independence Day. While it has become a day of outdoor fun and family get-togethers, hot dogs, beer, burgers, parades, and fireworks, its meaning has not been completely lost, but its not at the forefront of our minds, either.  So, I wanted to take a moment to briefly consider what July 4th means to me.

As a Libertarian who is anything but happy with the current state of politics, government intrusion, lost liberty, and an ever more powerful central government, I want to cast aside that mask necessarily painted with cynicism for a moment. After all, cynicism is not actually my dominant disposition, despite assumptions people make of me.  Neither am I a Pollyanna.  I think I tend to see the world as both glass half full and half empty, but overall my I see myself as a realistic idealist, if that can be a thing.  At heart, on a macro level, I’m an optimist.

And, I’m glad I’m alive at this time in history, and live in the United States of America.

There are real problems in the country today, and in the world, some of them are seemingly unsolvable, but I understand that my life today would no doubt be far from the relatively easy and joyful life it is without the foresight, wisdom, guile, and courage of American Patriots living in the late 1700’s, many of whom died on a battlefield before their goal had been achieved, and was far from certain. In an age when it was undisputed that men should be ruled by oligarchies, those Patriots dared to try a radical experiment.

Source: Library of Congress

Signing of the Declaration of Independence

They renounced loyalty to their inept King after he refused their right to have a voice in their governance, and said, we can not only do this better, but we’ll do it without a supreme, single ruler. We’ll do this together. We’ll give power to all citizens, and we’ll restrict and monitor power from our heads of state. We’ll fight to the death to prove that individuals, not some fat and detached man who never earned anything he had been given living thousands of miles away, are best suited to determine what’s best for them. Not anyone else. They dared to decry that noblemen and monarchs are not imbued with divine powers, nor are they better than their subjects, but that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This World is On Fire

The Americans who took up arms against their King under penalty and strong risk of death, risking wealth, reputation, honor, and livelihoods to carve out a piece of the world devoted to treating human beings as equals, deserve our respect and admiration. They were imperfect, flawed people. Although they eloquently clarified a vision of human lives lived with freedom, they were not always (or often) able to live up to their own rhetoric.  They allowed the shameful institution of slavery to exist in stark contradiction to their ideals, to be determined through much bloodshed nearly a century later.  Yet they did something that had never been done on such a scale in the history of mankind: They set the world on fire with dreams of liberty and self-determination. They showed that the pursuit of individual endeavors is worth fighting for, and achievable. Despite all of our flaws as a nation, Americans and all citizens of the world who enjoy the benefits of democracy, civil rights, and self-rule, owe a great debt to these brave souls – from soldiers, to statesmen, to farmers, to merchants, to writers, and ordinary citizens who supported the crazy dream — who risked it all 237 years ago.

And for all our bumps in the road, all our mis-steps — many of them appallingly huge — it is an astonishing thing, this American Experiment. This week in Egypt, a coup ousted its president just two short years after the Arab Spring and that country’s institution of a new democratic government.  It’s truly amazing that I sit here 237 years after my nation’s founding, free to openly criticize the rhetoric of its 44th President, who like all those before him were elected peacefully. More astonishingly, all those before him left office freely upon the end of their terms, of their own accord, and in peace. To an American, the word coup sounds exotic, and primitive. We’ve never faced such a scenario.  For all its hiccups and imperfections, this American Dream is an awe-inspiring thing to be a small part of. I feel so fortunate to be alive and on this piece of dirt at this time in the history of the Earth. As thanks, I promise to do my best to advance the causes of liberty and individual happiness in honor of all of those men and women through the ages who made this amazing existence possible for the rest of my life.  And I promise not to allow comfort to lull me into accepting anything less than that perfect dream of individual liberty and happiness.

Cheers,
PersephoneK

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SCOTUS Ruling on ObamaCare Sad Day for Liberty

By on June 28, 2012 in Liberty & Freedom, US & International Affairs

Shock and sadness. 

Those are the raw emotions that have been cycling through my body for the past several minutes after learning of the Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) ruling over ObamaCare (or the Affordable Care Act, ACA).  I did not see this coming.  I fully expected, naively so it would seem, for this law to be overturned, and ruled unconstitutional.

I was wrong. 

More surprisingly, conservative Justice Roberts, of all Justices, weighed in as the swing vote.  BAM!  Knockout punch.  Down for the count.

For me, this decision was never (mostly) about Americans’ rights to medical care.  Healthcare and access to insurance are complex issues in my mind, and I’m not completely sure where I fall on the morality side of all points of the issue.  I have been a major flip-flopper over the past decade.  I’ll save that discussion for another time perhaps. 

The ObamaCare ruling has always been about the amount of power We The People want our federal (and really any level of) government to hold over us. 

Without having yet had the chance to read the full opinion (so I reserve the right to modify this position later), it is my understanding that the primary basis SCOTUS used in upholding the “individual mandate” portion of the law, which essentially requires everyone to purchase health insurance, is that they deemed it a “tax” as opposed to a fee.  This effectively removed the Commerce Clause from the equation, in their minds.  Once that was done, SCOTUS ruled that since Congress has the constitutional power to implement taxes on the people, it has the power to implement the individual mandate portion of the law.  The individual mandate portion of the law was the glue holding everything together.  If they’d struck it down, the entire law likely would have been thrown out.  They kept it in, so the law stays too.  Justice Roberts did make the point to say that the decision does not comment on the wisdom of the law, but rather on its constitutionality. 

Fine.  Done.  Not good.

I feel SCOTUS took the easy off-ramp on this one.  Once they removed the Commerce Clause from the argument, this was an easy victory for the President.  Of course Congress has the power to tax (how much or whether or not they should, is a completely different discussion also for another time), but I will concede, this is one of its powers. 

In my opinion, the individual mandate is not a tax.  It is an automatic “opt-in” program (unless my state opts-out??? but we’ll put a pin in that for now), with a penalty assessed to “opt-out.”  Either way, I pay.  Just for having been born in this country, I must pay for something that the government has no business in controlling in the first place.  I pay either for myself, or for others, or both of us.  I pay for something that should be left up to the marketplace.

Oops.  I said I wasn’t going to get into the broader healthcare vs. government discussion, but here I am. It’s all so intertwined.  While I would love to live in a world where money is never a consideration to whether or not someone receives the best medical care, I don’t. We don’t.  We never will.  It is a utopian dream that is impossible to realize.  Everything has a price.  Everything is paid for in some way.  Socialism in its various forms never works because it denies the basic laws of economics.  It is what we (some of us) want the world to be, not what it is.  When I was seven, I wished endlessly for the Millennium Falcon to appear on my front lawn, but it never did.  No matter how much I wanted it to be true, it just wasn’t possible.

The next best thing we have in Human society to an impossible Utopia is the Free Market system of Capitalism, and the presumption that “all men are created equal… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights… that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”  It’s not perfect.  It’s sometimes not pretty.  But by using the power of the markets, and the rule of law to protect individual liberty, we allow individuals to decide what is best for themselves, provided they do not infringe on the rights of others to do the same. 

Today, President Obama said this in his victory response: “I did it because I believed it was good for the American people.”  Thank you Mr. President, but I do not need you to decide what is good for me.  I need you to execute the laws of the land, and uphold the ideals for which this country was founded through centuries of blood, sweat and tears, and framed so perfectly the beautiful sentence I cited above from the Declaration of Independence.  That is what I want from you.  I want nothing else.  

Unfortunately, now that ObamaCare has been vindicated by the highest court in the land – a decision I respectfully, but strongly disagree with – I fear that this president, those who follow, and Congress will feel emboldened to even more vigorously impose their wills upon us, strip us of more freedoms, all in the name of doing me “good” as if I were a child – or a small dog.  This is a path I’m terrified of traversing.  Government, and government power grows ever larger.  It seems to be a one way directional machine.  The more we allow this to happen, the more complicity we are in our eventual total loss of freedom.  It’s not without precedent.  After all, that is how this nation came to exist in the first place.  Power corrupts; Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  We’re not quite there, but it’s only a matter of time before history repeats itself.

Cheers,

PersephoneK

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