Posted at 9:40 am on August 14, 2010 by Doctor Zero
In the comments to The Dominion of Liars, itzWicks asks:
The refrain that I hear over and over again at the conclusion of excellent essays such as this (as well as from the well articulated comments that follow on this blog) is sadly the same: “What are we going to do about it? What can be done now?”
That’s a great question. It’s easy to react, analyze, and criticize. It’s natural for a writer to spend much of his time doing so, when the philosophy he opposes holds all the power, and makes all the news. Today’s current events are largely created by the Left.
I write essays like “The Dominion of Liars” because I believe every opportunity should be taken to present the case that statism is fundamentally flawed, from its mistaken premises to its corrupt conclusions. It’s important to couple that prosecution with testimony about the power and virtue of freedom, along with a fair accounting of its dangers.
The scale of the challenge facing us is formidable. Like all fearsome things, it is also exhilarating. In the blood and bile of this dying statist economy, we can see the desperate future of an indentured nation… a truth many of us have refused to see, when displayed in bankrupt socialism around the world. What is the destiny of a free nation?
It will be a future of responsibility. Irresponsibility leads to dependence, which makes demands. It is impossible for anyone to be truly free until they renounce the obligation of others to provide their sustenance. Until then, dependents and providers wear matching sets of chains, and great power resides in the State that decides how long those chains will be. When resources are taken from each according to their means, and given to each according to their needs, the moral authority of those who balance those needs against each other becomes absolute.
No wonder the constituencies of socialist America regard their political elite as saints, compared to the captains of industry. The system demands such faith from its subjects. If politicians are selfish and corrupt, and their bureaucrats are blinded by dogma, who would trust them to fairly and logically ration subsidies and benefits? Look around you, and learn beyond question that they are selfish and corrupt. There is no brilliant design behind “stimulus” spending, ObamaCare, the massive federal budget, or central industrial policy. They were born in the filth of insider deals and payoffs, ideology and greed.
The destiny of a free nation lies in overthrowing its aristocracy. We have no need of a privileged class that makes plans to increase trillion-dollar deficits in between rounds of golf and lavish Spanish vacations. It makes no sense to submit to commands from the same people who deliver endless loads of “unexpected” bad news about the economy. We must decisively reject the feckless greed of a Party that demands billions more in revenue to fund a budget they haven’t even written. Over two hundred years after our Founders wrote about the transcendent nature of freedom, we are still struggling with the enormous idea that it must be applied universally.
Reaching our destiny will require courage. We are the grandchildren of revolutionaries, both natural-born and adopted through immigration. Together we are a family of builders, investors, explorers, and warriors. The American posture is not a frightened crouch. To discover what we are capable of, we must reject the vision of a hopeless future, where timid clients line up at government offices to receive benefits they cannot be trusted to create or purchase themselves.
Granting the State power over an industry is a concession that it can only be managed through force and compulsion, which are the State’s only resources. Freedom is the rejection of compulsion, isn’t it? Your choices are to be free, or be cared for… and keep in mind that the promises of those who promise to care for you can only be funded by taxing the labor of those who choose freedom. Ask yourself how a system that devours itself to survive could end anywhere other than where Barack Obama has taken us.
Our future will grow from the energetic courtship of ideas. The statist suppresses ideas which challenge his ideology. Note well how much effort the various organisms of the Left put into shouting people down, and burying dangerous ideas. Watch them blink in confusion as reality defies their ideology. Examine their rhetorical toolbox, and you’ll find nothing but the blunt instruments of class and racial insults. The acolytes of Big Government offer nothing but lists of things free people supposedly cannot achieve. We are foolish to allow those with such limited imaginations to tell us what is impossible.
The exercise of freedom through capitalism demands ready access to reliable information. A consumer isn’t making a “free” choice when he’s suckered by a con artist… or when the true prices of goods and services are obscured by a multi-layered veil of subsidies and mandates. Money is a medium of exchange for the value of your labor. When money is devalued, prices are hidden, and income is siphoned away through the raw power of government, your time is being confiscated. Free people seek employment, not servitude.
A destiny of freedom will also be one of accountability. We have been drenched in the proof that Big Government exists to shield its masters from accountability. Every disaster born from government “partnership” with the private sector, from subprime mortgages to offshore oil spills, has ended with the political “partners” skipping away to even greater heights of power.
We require no further lessons in morality from a political class that throws extravagant parties for its successful criminals, to help them deal with the pain of their wrist slaps. The elite of a monster government have too many interests to conduct their duties honorably. We must express our absolute intolerance for wild deficit spending – the ultimate evasion of accountability, in which the cost of buying votes is pushed over a rapidly-approaching horizon.
The American people must choose between control and stagnation, or risk and growth. No one can impose prosperity. We will find it together, when we rid ourselves of mandatory “benefits” that crush small entrepreneurs. We cannot hand over a vast portion of the private sector to government control, and expect the remainder to flourish. Through our intelligence and industry, we each carry answers to the needs of our fellow citizens. We can require them to earn our business through competition, or seize our labor through compulsion. Choose the former, or suffer through the horrible extremes of the latter. It never works, and it’s an idea that takes a lot of people with it when it dies.
Responsibility, courage, imagination, and accountability: these are both the destiny of a free nation, and the tools required to achieve it. You will find scant evidence of any of these things in the arrogant, greedy, sanctimonious, and corrupt beast dying of consumption in our national and state capitols. Embrace these virtues, all at once… show people how each is related to the other, and how they blend into the antithesis of the failed super-State. I believe they will rediscover the strength to dismantle this broken system, and reclaim the freedom represented by the trillions of dollars it has consumed. The answer does not lie in a grand central plan. It will be found after such plans have been shredded.
It won’t be easy, and success is not guaranteed… but haven’t we learned, halfway through this exhausted Presidency, that nothing great is achieved without vision, effort, and risk?
