Economic Equality: The Cancer that Killed Freedom
By JB Williams (05/06/08)
For more than 200 years, America reigned as the worlds most productive, prosperous, powerful and generous nation on earth. Like all nations, America is nothing more or less than the sum of its people and their belief system.
In the case of America, they were once a people who had risked all to gain national independence and sovereignty, individual liberty and personal freedom for every man, woman and child. Generation after generation volunteered the blood of its best citizens to protect individual rights from all who would attack them in the name of some greater common good.
The brave who demanded to be free, understood that there is no good on earth greater than that of individual freedom and thousands of good men have died preserving those freedoms for others.
Today, these ideas are capturing the imaginations of people around the world who have never known freedom, thanks to the American spirit still alive and well in the American soldier, who still offers his life to provide freedom for complete strangers all over the world.
But in America, these Same Ideas are Dying
Many Americans have bought into a greater good sold as “economic equality.” This is the cancer that is bringing freedom’s reign to an end. The quest for political power to rule over the lives of others has driven politicians to seek ever increasing power over what were once private earned resources.
Individual votes have been divided into voting blocs and those blocs are purchased with ideologically driven gifts from the treasury. As Thomas Jefferson pointed out so well, “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” It’s called Democratic Socialism today.
America is at the Tipping Point
Jefferson warned, “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
Yet by 2008, our government has perfected the art of wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them. This is what our government does best and what most modern politicians sell from the campaign stump today.
Karl Marx’s idea, that “each must give according to his ability; so that each can be given according to his need,” has taken root in the most unlikely of places, America. As American soldiers die to guarantee others around the world, the right to individual self-determination, average Americans back home are trading their individual right of self-determination for an alleged greater good, the right to the earnings of others, in the name of economic equality.
Americans are passing their individual powers to define and pursue individual economic conditions to the state, the federal bureaucracy, under the guise of a greater communal good, whereby the state becomes the central arbiter of individual worth. The lawful earnings of some are confiscated, for the alleged betterment of others.
As this power passes from each individual to a central governing power, individual freedom and liberty is snuffed out, replaced with an arbitrary economic equality as defined, confiscated via progressive taxation and redistributed by those who seek the political power to rule over the lives of others.
The American People are the Problem
In a national epidemic of individual irresponsibility, it has become a national pastime to accuse politicians of destroying America, but it is the American people who are the real problem. To sum it up, politicians can’t buy votes that are not for sale.
When the American vote was not for sale, it could not be purchased at any price. When most Americans were real patriots, “a person who loves, supports, and defends his or her country and its interests with devotion” – they were not so easily fooled by promises of free benefits (paid for by others) and snake oil salesmen promising dancing sugar plums from the campaign stage.
Politicians are a Creation of the People
Politicians are nothing more than a manifestation of the perceived will of the people. Politicians pander. Most politicians don’t care what they have to promise to purchase your vote, so long as your vote is for sale.
For politicians, it’s all about the quest for political office and the political power and wealth that comes with that office today. For them, the end always justifies the means in their myopic quest for personal power and wealth.
If politicians perceived that more than 51% of American voters would settle for nothing shy of complete individual freedom and liberty, they would pander to that will. As it is, too many Americans, a perceived majority, seem to prefer the promise of free-stuff over the tired old unfair promise of individual freedom, so that is the will of the people which most politicians pander to today.
Slaves to the Sales Pitch
Americans are the most reliable consumers in the world. All they need is a good sales pitch, someone willing to tell them what they want to hear and all the relative facts in the world won’t stop them from buying that which is what they think they want.
Americans have storage facilities full of crap they thought they wanted at one point, but have never even taken out of the box once arrived, or unpacked once they moved and forgot they even had it. Today, they will buy something else and tomorrow, something again.
We are natural consumers and slaves to a great sales pitch. That’s how a freshman racist nobody with a blank job application is leading the race for the Oval Office right now. All the relative facts state without doubt, that Barack Hussein Obama is patently unfit to be President of the United States. But he sure has a good sales pitch and American consumers are flocking to his side, no matter the mountain of evidence suggesting just how dangerously anti-American and politically inept the man really is.
Hillary Clinton supporters completely ignore her life-long support of Marxism and résumé full of political crime and corruption second to none, because they like her sales pitch of free health care and promises to strip “rich folks” of their lawful earnings and individual right to pursue happiness, just to use the money to buy votes from Americans who have used their freedoms less wisely.
The facts don’t matter at all, so long as the sales pitch is strong. They buy into her promise to remove .25 cents in federal taxes from a gallon of gas, and ignore her promise to replace it with a .50 cent per gallon tax at the corporate level, as if they don’t know that the corporation will pass that .50 cents per gallon tax right back down to the people at the pumps.
Is Hillary Clinton not smart enough to know what she is suggesting, or is she simply smart enough to know just how ignorant her voters are? For the record, Hillary is very smart. For you Hillary supporters, find a mirror to find the fool.
John McCain is conservative on many issues. But not on the most pressing issues of our day. On illegal immigration, national sovereignty and security, stopping the next 9/11 and returning America to prosperity and power through the capitalist concepts that made us a great nation to begin with, he is a liberal. Yet many of his supporters fail to hold his feet to the fire on the issues that matter most as well, because his sales pitch is not as crazy as his Marxist opponents.
No Free Lunch
Despite the fact that your grandpa was 1000% right when he told you that “there is no free lunch on this earth,” you still hope to find a free lunch somewhere, somehow. And politicians smart enough to hear this will of the people are devious enough in their quest for power to pander to that will, knowing all the time that Americans are voting themselves out of freedom and back into tyranny at every election, in their search for more free stuff.
A Cancer
Greed is a very real emotion which can be used for good or evil. When it is the factor which motivates a man to develop life saving medicines or technologies, greed is good. But when it motivates other men to take the lawful earnings of others, to grab personal power via corrupt political office by buying the votes of fools, greed is evil.
Money is neither good nor evil. When used for good, money is good and when used for evil, it becomes evil. There is no more evil on earth than the enslavement of human beings in the name of a greater common good. There is no greater common good than individual freedom itself.
And there is No Running from Reality
Since no two human beings are created exactly alike, there is no such thing as absolute equality. Every individual is unique, with different dreams, talents, desires and tolerances for risk or pain. So, each individual enjoys a unique set of results, or life circumstances. Some are driven by the pursuit of wealth, others by the pursuit of power and still others by much simpler pleasures.
As a result, the greatest treasure on earth is the freedom and liberty to be ourselves, whatever that is, as only we can define it, individually. There is NO greater good on earth!
The search for economic equality is a political ruse. Study lotto winners who are broke again shortly after winning more than they would have ever earned in a lifetime.
Passing Off Risk
To eliminate the risk of failure, one must relinquish the right to succeed.
Americans seeking to eliminate their right to fail must also eliminate the right to succeed, not only for themselves, but for everyone.
Insurance is the industry of “passing off risk.” We pay money in the form of premiums, to get insurance carriers to accept risks which are unacceptable to us. We agree to give up a portion of our earnings up front, under the belief that this is “less risky” than self-insuring against those events covered in our insurance policy.
Based on statistics, insurance carriers agree to accept responsibility for certain events for a price. They lose some and win others and in the end, they hope to win more than they lose in order to turn a profit for shareholders.
When we buy car insurance or heath insurance, we are simply paying someone else to gamble on the risks we won’t gamble on ourselves.
When we are no longer willing to gamble on individual freedom, personal success or failure by our own choosing, and ask the government to accept the risks we are unwilling to accept, we are attempting to pass off the risk of individual failure to those who seek the power to rule over the lives of others.
We do so under the misconception that this is somehow free. We think it’s free because politicians promise to send the bill to someone else. But there ain’t no free lunch. Everything on this planet costs something.
The rich will pay with their lawful earnings. But the rest of us will pay with our freedom. The cost of insurance against individual failure is the individual freedom to succeed.
For our nation’s Founders and most American generations up until now, this price was far too high. No amount of free-stuff trumped the promise of freedom itself. This is no longer true in America and as a result, the lie called economic equality is a cancer that is bringing death and destruction to individual freedom and liberty.
A greed that once fueled individual achievement, unparalleled prosperity and the greatest nation ever known to man is now used to strip some Americans of their right to define and pursue individual happiness, all to support an Americanized version of Democratic Socialism.
Freedom’s light is dim, like the wit of too many Americans who foolishly ignore the lessons of our past and trade individual rights for the rights of a greater common good, the right of fifty-one percent of the people [to] take away the rights of the other forty-nine, in the name of economic equality.
Abraham Lincoln said it exactly right! But few Americans care to hear his words…
* You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
* You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
* You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
* You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.
* You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
* You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.
* You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.
In the end, the rich will remain rich, even if they have to move their assets to safe havens off-shore, which is already happening. But the rest will no longer be free.
History repeats itself only because people refuse to remember the lessons of their past. Before Americans will respect freedom over free-stuff again, they must re-learn what it is like to live in bondage. Only one, who lives in bondage, is willing to give everything for freedom. And, so we will learn again… the hard way.
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