This is a re-post from one year ago
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison
At Maggie's Farm, we tend to suspect that issues such as medical insurance, gun control, health, and climate fears are indeed Trojan Horse issues (as Coyote terms them), advocated to increase goverment control over our lives and to reduce our choices, freedom, and self-determination as free adults who are capable of managing our own lives, in our own ways - for better or worse.
No, not "capable" - "endowed by our Creator" and our history with that privilege and that freedom. One must be suspicious of motives when vast, costly government-control solutions are offered to trumped-up or imaginary "crises."
"We the people" are smart enough to figure it all out for ourselves, despite what the self-anointed "elite" might think: not one of the "elite" is better educated, or more worldly, than we ADD-victim redneck folks at Maggie's are. As we like to snobbishly say, "Who are these people?"
"I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive." - Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 12/20/1787
The people who seek control are not necessarily evil: they no doubt believe that they are not only benign but virtuously-intentioned, and especially qualified to make decions for us. They almost certainly believe that they are more "caring" than I am.
The single most damaging error of the modern age is the misperception of government as an agency of compassion. As a replacement for the "divine right of kings," this misperception has, for those in power, been an astonishing success. For the rest of mankind, it has frequently been a disaster beyond imagining. Government is nothing more than structured, widespread coercion, and the idea that it can implement compassion for us by force is simply a vile and cunning lie. It is cunning because people are primed and willing, even desperate, to believe it. - Glenn Allport
However, individual freedom does not enter into their equations as a caring virtue - or even as a virtue or American ideal at all. (We believe it to be a transcendent ideal, and a gift of God.) Hence what we view as the totalitarian or, as Goldberg and H.G. Wells would have it, "fascistic" proclivities of the Left.
"When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, 'there ought to be a law,' you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap." - Thomas Sowell
Since we at Maggie's view individual liberty, and the responsibilitities which accompany it, as an almost religious, if not religious ideal, we must view those who wish to diminish liberty as enemies of man and of human dignity.
"...every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Ammendment." -- Justice Louis Brandeis (Olmstead v. US)
Are we paranoid about State power? Given human history, and the course of US history, we do not think so.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." - John Philpot Curran: Speech upon the Right of Election, 1790. (Speeches. Dublin, 1808.)
Furthermore, we do not wish to rely on the judgement of anyone who wants to run any part of our lives. As Milton Friedman asks in this entertaining YouTube, "Where are these angels who are going to run my life for me?"
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." - James Madison, Federalist #51.
"It is weakness rather than wickedness which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power." - John Adams, 1788
No, we aren't anarchists. We do not object to drivers' licenses, or even hunting licenses. We will pay a fair share of taxes as a price of civilization. I do not even mind zoning if the people vote for it, and I am all in favor of national, state and local parks. But we are not willing to be "governed." That's where we draw the line. Being "governed" is for children (by "governesses"). Free citizens must learn to be self-governing as adults which, as our Dr. Bliss often reminds us, is no easy task but is a highly worthy and ennobling pursuit.
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." - George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutions, 1903
It's all about where you draw the line for government intrusion into one's life. Some of us still want to be Americans, not Europeans. But that's enough pontificating for now.
Top image: A photo of Westport, CT's Minuteman statue on Compo Road, near Compo Beach (via Dr. X). In my own, humble internet way, I want to continue our Minutemen's work and their radical ideal of individual freedom and responsibility in a country free of government tyranny. "We the people," (excluding those with their hands out) have more sense and more life experience than anyone in a government career, or any of the elites on the academic dole.
Lower image: An old lithograph of the Boston Tea party
