What Freedom Demands
posted at 7:41 pm on March 21, 2010 by Doctor Zero
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Tonight, self-appointed wise men in Washington are steamrolling the objections of sixty to seventy percent of the population, and forcing a massive health-care bill down our throats “for our own good.” Presumably the backroom deals, corrupt payoffs, Congressional Budget Office accounting tricks, threats of unconstitutional parliamentary maneuvers, and betrayals of principle are also for our own good. What do you know? Banana republics turn out to be the highest evolution of government – the only form of the State equipped to take proper care of its citizens, by lying to them and trapping them in legislative cages over their howling protests.
Tonight is not the end of the ObamaCare saga, but it does mark the beginning of a slow turn by the American ship of state. It doesn’t have to be a turn to the left. On the contrary, it could be the first overture in a rebirth of our commitment to freedom, and the last gasp of an exhausted statist ideology, long overdue for its disposal in the waste bin of history.
The decision is up to us. Our representatives will fight various legislative battles in the months to come… and then we will speak in November. As the voters of the United States ponder what to say, it would profit us to think long and hard about the freedom Democrats are trying to take from us tonight, and what freedom demands.
Yes, it makes demands. Freedom is not a gift. It is not given to you by the government, in a precise dosage that can be adjusted to match a politician’s diagnosis of what ails the body politic. Your forefathers won an impossible Revolution against an invincible foe to declare the self-evident truth that your rights descend from your Creator. Whether that Creator is a transcendent God, or a random combination of genetic material in the primordial soup, it is a power that existed before the first king assumed his throne, or the first president was elected. Liberty burns in your imagination, flows through your veins, and rings through your words.
This radiant idea has burned through all the bloody clouds of the last three centuries: you are not clay to be sculpted by the will of another. You are not a racially inferior inconvenience, to be marched into a concentration camp. You aren’t a class enemy to be exiled by dictators. You are not a disposable cog in the machinery of collectivist economics, or a mouth to be starved by the failure of collective agriculture. You are an American, and through a dereliction of their duty as elected representatives, the Democrats have forced you to choose whether you will retain the full measure of the honor and dignity your Constitution asserts for you.
If you choose to obey their demands, it will be the last such choice you make. Your opinion was disregarded on this travesty of a health-care bill. It will not be solicited in the future. Fifteen thousand new IRS agents will ensure that you comply with endless future “adjustments” to socialized insurance, until it mutates into socialist medicine, and bankrupts us along with the crushing weight of other unsustainable entitlements. On that dark day, you will be fighting battles, not making choices.
Like your muscles, heart, and lungs, freedom is a part of you, and it makes demands. You cannot exercise freedom in the absence of responsibility. That means you must accept the challenges of a complex, fast-moving world. You must exercise your influence in that world, and money is the medium of exchange that transforms your labor into your will. You have to demand the best return on your investments, and the best quality for your purchases. This requires education, to gather the information necessary for making wise decisions.
We are currently paying the price for decades of turning away from those demands, and trusting government to insure our quality of life. It’s understandable. The free market is huge and powerful, and it does not pause to adore the millions of individuals passing through it… and occasionally stumbling. We feel overwhelmed by the waves of information crashing around us. In the case of an arcane discipline like medicine, we don’t feel as if we understand it well enough to make informed decisions, and our will is expressed through an insurance system that has already been turned into an incomprehensible mess by government regulation. It would be so easy to let righteous politicians with limitless power and money take care of us, tapping into the vast fortunes of the super-rich for the benefit of all, and transforming health care into a “human right” – which means the little people won’t have to think about it any more.
If you are in thrall to this temptation, consider what you are being asked to surrender. Hidden in ObamaCare’s thousands of pages are countless legislative snares, and subsidies designed to convert your freedom into benefits for favored constituencies. The money drained from our economy into this health-care sinkhole will reduce your freedom – even when it’s money from the wallets of other people. That’s because a collapsing free market will eliminate choices and options you currently take for granted. Mandates that wipe out part-time employment will destroy services your family needs. Jobs shipped overseas to avoid crushing penalties are employment opportunities forever denied to you. Higher taxes on corporations slither down to you as elevated prices on goods you may no longer be able to afford.
A swelling government reduces the size of the private sector… the galaxy in which free Americans burn as stars. Common sense tells you that a nation with a gigantic government is less free. What is the proper name for a system in which the State controls everything, and the private sector is completely gone? Why should free men applaud heavy steps taken in that direction? What about the freedom of Bart Stupak’s constituents, who foolishly trusted him to resist the tyranny of forcing pro-life taxpayers to fund abortions? Today they watched Stupak’s honor shrivel into a meaningless piece of paper, offered by a compulsive liar, whose every commitment comes with an expiration date.
The call of freedom requires you to turn away easy solutions offered by corrupt politicians. It’s not a “solution” anyway – just the gateway to another, heavier imposition on your liberty down the line. If its authors believed otherwise, why would they use tricks and lies to chisel out a “deficit-neutral” ten-year forecast from the Congressional Budget Office? A free man dismisses such deception with contempt, and demands to know what happens in Year Eleven. A free woman looks at a “crisis” in a heavily regulated market and commands government to remove itself to undo the damage it has already caused. What is the final form of a State that is rewarded for its failures with more power? We already know that name, don’t we?
Tonight, the Democrat Party declares war on the American middle class. They are gambling on the forced creation of an entitlement we’ll be too exhausted and weary to reject – no matter how poor its quality, corrupt its inception, or unbearable its cost. We do have one last chance to strike this down. There is no reason any Democrat up for re-election in 2010 or 2012 needs to retain their seats. They don’t own those seats, any more than the Kennedys owned Massachussetts. There’s no reason the Democrats need to exist as a viable political party after 2012. Obama can be their last President.
It would be incredible if the American people could bring about such a transformation of their decadent political class, in these coming elections.
Sometimes freedom demands that you do the incredible to preserve it.
Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.
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Doc, another grand slam, especially on this day of days. Amid the horror of what is going on in Washington I feel oddly euphoric knowing that they have gone a bridge too far. With the prize of socialized medicine in their grasp after almost 80 years of slowly working for this goal, they have stripped their masks away and will never be able to disguise themselves again.
I’m expecting the Tea Party movement to double in ranks. Even after 2010…and 2012, 2014 and 2016 I feel like the leftists are going to be beat back and back and back.
So thanks Obama, Pelosi and Reed and the rest of the committed leftist “progressives,” you have truly waked a sleeping giant.
Sarjex on March 21, 2010 at 8:00 PM
Those who see government as a solution have little knowledge of wherefrom our rights derive.
Their sense of entitlement to the efforts, time, wages, and property of others leads them to declare “rights” that impose upon others the responsibility of providing such time, taxes, goods, and services. They justify these impositions on those who produce as “moral obligations.” But there is nothing moral about stealing from one man in order to give those things stolen to the favored beneficiary of the stealing (governing) party. The inherent morality of an obligation resides in the manner in which the actions constituting such behavior are exercised. If the charitable, or giving, action is voluntary, and performed in the spirit of true compassion, without expectation of recognition, thanks, or reward, it is truly moral. That which is coerced through force, either violently as in robbery, or via the legal mechanism of government through threat of fines or imprisonment, can never be declared moral, no matter the good purposes claimed as the reason for so doing. The proceeds of such actions are no better than stolen goods, being given to those with whom the enforcers wish to gain favor. Those who approve, enable, enact, or enforce such takings are nothing more than thieves, robbing those who produce of the ability to make their own moral choices of whom to help with their own time, money, or goods — in essence, stealing from them their liberty, the choice of how they may spend their lives.
As well, the takers’ insulation from the real world concepts of supply, demand, and costs is surpassed only by their ignorance of human nature. They assume a static economy to which they apply their programs. History has repeatedly shown, however, that this is never the case. When a governing body imposes obligations that the governed view as excessive, the results are fairly predictable. First, and most commonly, the behavior of the subject population changes. More transactions are done as untraceable/unreported cash. As the imposition becomes more burdensome, the producers scale back their operations, creating less, hiring fewer people, and slowing the general economy, all in an effort to reduce the percentage of their lives the government is claiming a right to. This has less to do with how much money the government is taking than with what portion of our lives the government is claiming. This is a roadmap for economic ruin.
The second thing that can occur is that the producing class finally tires of the domination of the government, and openly rebels. This action can range from peaceful, civil disobedience to the extreme of outright violence.
When the burden of government becomes too heavy, its representatives too unresponsive, its actions too offensive to a society of free people, it is not simply the right, it is the absolute duty of those same free people to take action as necessary to reclaim their own destiny and reassert themselves as the masters of their own lives and fates.
What form this shall take rests entirely on the tenacity with which the oppressive governing institutions cling to their structures of power. I pray that the process is peaceful.
LooseCannon on March 21, 2010 at 8:46 PM
If there is any justice at all, the Democrat Party in its current incarnation ought to be finished after this weekend.
Cylor on March 21, 2010 at 9:42 PM
Staying on the roll, huh, Doc.
This iteration of history has been repeated several times in different geographical locations. If not for governmental force-feeding of politically correct dogma for the last 35-40 years, to students that “all get a trophy” regardless of performance, we’d have a more educated electorate and less opportunity for this madness. And many fewer votes for socialism leading up to this.
There are many possibilities to the outcomes that we may all awake to. If the vote is pro-Obamacare there is most likely going to be a lame duck president after November. There will be many opportunities to whittle back Obamacare if not downright rescind it. It may take a couple of years, but the legal challenges alone should keep the wolves at bay.
You and the other commentors are correct in assuming the underground economy will grow if this Bill passes. Federal and state revenues will shrink. Medical research will languish. Governmental interference in the free markets will necessarily expand, and the momentum will never cease until a total collapse of “the American way of life” occurs. Unless, of course, we decide to elect patriotic, capitalistic, free-enterprise, God fearing, family loving, honest, and courageous representatives to office. Not the knuckleheads, nit-wits, and socialistic, lying, conniving statist thugs that seem to be in vogue lately.
Robert17 on March 21, 2010 at 10:00 PM
Doc, If I could I would give you the biggest, most comforting, ginormous hug I’ve ever given!!!
katy on March 21, 2010 at 10:31 PM
That is the most powerful sentence written since the founders declaration!
katy on March 21, 2010 at 10:36 PM
Amen to that!
beachgirlusa on March 21, 2010 at 10:46 PM
Ed, Can you move this to the main page. We probably need something like this right now.
katy on March 21, 2010 at 10:50 PM
Excellent, very well said.
beachgirlusa on March 21, 2010 at 11:10 PM
They get way too much credit. How many of them actually think they’re doing it for “our own good?”
I’d wager maybe 1% of them. I bet most of them know this is about government power, not about health care. They’re rotten, through and through. They lie.
Daggett on March 22, 2010 at 12:05 AM
Exactly Doc!
Easy Targets to Remember in November!
“Let’s Roll”
On Watch on March 22, 2010 at 12:23 AM
Now I know how Washington’s troops felt as they read Tom Paine’s The Crisis.
Disturb the Universe on March 22, 2010 at 7:30 AM
This post has been promoted to HotAir.com.
Comments have been closed on this post but the discussion continues here.
Ed Morrissey on March 22, 2010 at 8:40 AM
Doc you’re absolutely right on healthcare. You know Obama’s next step? Amnesty for illegals and more legal immigration. To create new voters just in time for 2012. I know it sounds crazy, but we can actually get rid of Nationalized healthcare in the future in 2010 by voting in a new congress. Then eventually overturning it. However, if Obama radically changes the demographics to bring in a large swath of un-assimilated Democratic voters before 2012, The GOP is dead. Right now unchanged, we’ll have the demographics to crush them. You change them though, and we’re screwed. The media will float the 2050 story line: White people are dying, invite the third world in to repopulate everything. This is a sensationalized reality they wish to create based on current levels of legal/illegal immigration and birth rates. Amnesty will make this scenario a reality. However, if we shoot Amnesty down God willing, then this scenario disappears. The Center for Immigration Studies does excellent research on the topic of immigration itself. Mark Levin used their research for his excellent book. Mark Levin points out as well: ALL immigration must be lowered! LEGAL and Illegal. A lot of Republicans only hear Illegal, but all immigration must be lowered. Then we enforce our laws, build a physical wall, assimilation and English as the official language. If Amnesty prevails though, say hello to permanent Statism, Because then there’s no way to ever repeal anything. Anyway Doc, please visit the Center for Immigration Studies website, they have a lot of research posted there. You can see many charts, analysis and other things. I’d love to hear your thoughts after you’ve researched everything. Contact Mark Krikorian too, or Steven Camerota, they’re both researchers there.
Humphrey007 on March 22, 2010 at 8:36 PM