True Freedom
Freedom...liberty. Founding principles of these United States. Crucial to the distinctive character of this nation and the primary reason for its success. We have been described as a beacon of freedom for all the world. Our constitution was designed to limit the power of government so we would remain so. There is no question, however, that the freedom we experience today is not the same as that of one or two hundred years ago. The question is, how free are we and are the freedoms we retain the important ones?
If someone asked you to name some of your freedoms, a few may come to mind right off the top of your head. We have the freedom to live where we like....as long as the local government does not decide our property would bring in more tax revenue as a strip mall or the environmentalists don’t label our land a protected habitat or a wetland. We have the freedom to say what we want....as long as it isn’t too loud for then we become subject to the rules of political correctness. God forbid someone may be ‘offended’. We have the freedom to travel.....as long as our vehicle is properly registered, we obey all the traffic laws and wear our seat belts. We have freedom of religion....as long as we aren’t to pushy about it, don’t wear the symbols of our religion in places they might ‘offend’ or move the display of our religion outside of culturally accepted norms. We do have the unbridled and unregulated freedom to choose between Cheerios and Frosted Flakes, cable and satellite, paper or plastic (except in San Francisco). We are free to watch porn on the Internet, drink ourselves into a stupor and listen to music that advocates bestiality, rape and murder. All certainly essential to our experience of freedom, don’t you agree?
What about some of the more important choices we make in our lives, how free are those? Educating our children, for instance. There is no question that the education and raising of our children is crucial to their well being and that of our society. And there are as many different opinions as to how to raise and educate children as there are parents but do parents have any real choices here? The fact is, those choices depend on your wealth. If you can’t afford to send your child to private school, you don’t have the freedom to choose a better public school. Your child will have to take his chances in a school that is failing to prepare children for the competitive global marketplace and is staffed by teachers good, bad and indifferent; it’s the roll of the dice for you.
How about retirement? Sure, we have the choice to save money in an IRA or play in the stock market but the money we play with is our government allowance. First, we must contribute our fourteen percent to Social Security, a retirement program with dismal returns. And for those of us under forty five, we wonder if we will see that money at all. We all know there is no real account in which our money sits and grows...slowly. It is simply a government promise, a promise made in the hope that after the Baby Boomers bankrupt the system, the government will somehow come up with the money to pay our promised benefits. Doing a simple risk analysis, is sure would be nice to take our fourteen percent and put it into something else for our retirement but that is not something we have the freedom to do.
What about my personal well being, my health care? Here again, our choices, for the moment, are limited by our income. For most, our choices are restricted by our insurance companies, the premiums for which are paid for out of our incomes after the government takes its money for Medicare and Medicaid. While we still have some choice in health care, those choices are rapidly eroding because of high costs directly related to the fact that insurance companies, government and private, have driven up the price to a point where those who desire to pay on their own can’t afford it.
It doesn’t have to be this way and my own recent experience proves this. I went to Wal Mart for an eye exam for new glasses and the exam was under fifty dollars. Because there was a questionable result, I was referred to an optometrist where I received the same exam with the same equipment, except for the taking of some pictures, and it cost over three hundred dollars, and that was with the cash discount. Within the same year, I ended up in the emergency room where I received an MRI and some painkillers. I was in there less time than I was for the eye exam and it was several thousand dollars. The bill for the two minutes I spent with the doctor, who was not even and MD but a physician’s assistant, was over five hundred dollars! That’s the equivalent of fifteen thousand dollars an hour! The difference between for profit, no insurance places like Wal Mart (also making available cheap prescriptions), Lasik, and even cosmetic surgery centers, and hospitals and clinics that take insurance, particularly government insurance, couldn’t be more stark. Same advanced equipment but the service is much better and the price is hardly comparable. That is because when insurance is involved, the customer is not the patient but the insurance company, they’re the one’s who pay. When no insurance is involved, it is the patient who is the customer and must be treated accordingly because they have a choice. They can take their dollars wherever they like, they don’t have an insurance company restricting their options.
However, despite the deficiencies in the system, there is a push to make it infinitely worse by putting the government in charge of the whole health care field and eliminating our choices, our freedom, all together. For some unknown reason, there are a lot of people who think putting a government bureaucrat in charge of their health care will actually make it better. We don’t even have to guess about how it will turn out. Look at Europe and Canada. Rationing, long waits and low quality are the hallmarks of every system. Is that what we really want? Do we want to give up our freedom over our health care knowing that it will get worse and not better?
What about our charity dollars, the money we give to those less fortunate than ourselves. Again, we are still free to give our government allowance to whatever charity we desire but the money the government takes from us for ‘charitable’ purposes is too often spent in ways most of us may object to. If it was our choice, would give our money for free needles to drug addicts, free condoms to the promiscuous, more money for every child produced by a welfare mother? Would we pour our money into programs that destroy the family and create dependency? I doubt it, but do we have the freedom to choose? No.
Over two hundred years ago a group of men arose who were tired of seeing a far away government tax and spend in ways that were not in their best interests. They saw a government taking away their freedoms one by one. They found themselves subject to a government that made decisions that caused economic harm. They pledged their lives to the elimination of such tyranny. The government in Washington and in many states has become that which we rebelled against, and much worse. Choice is the essence of freedom and liberty and we are rapidly losing the few important choices left to us. According to the founders, governments are instituted to secure our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The idea of government is that we, as free people, surrender some small and clearly defined portion of our sovereignty in order to create a level playing field and ensure that our liberty is not threatened either domestically or by some foreign entity.
For the last hundred years, our government has come to operate under the assumption that it, and not we, are responsible for our lives, liberties and pursuits. It is no longer the guardian of our liberty but the custodian of it. If our liberty and freedom were a box of candy, under the founder’s system we possessed the box and the government was like our big brother that kept others from taking our box. Under today’s system, we no longer posses the box. It is held by our mother who gives it out as she sees fit. Sometimes she can be liberal with it, sometimes stingy, but the point is that it is out of our control and we let it become so. Are we responsible adults or little children? Have we become so lazy and apathetic that we don’t really care about our choices, are we happy turning over all our responsibility to the government? If so, we have become mere slaves and the founder’s vision is dead, it only awaits the final nails in the coffin. But if we believe in liberty and the responsibility for our own choices that go with it, then it is time we stood up and said no more. It is time to say with Jefferson and the founders that the “long train of abuses and usurpations” that have led us to “absolute despotism” will end now or there will be a new revolution at hand. It is time that men and women of vision and conviction, “with a firm reliance on Divine Providence...pledge...our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” to the task.
If someone asked you to name some of your freedoms, a few may come to mind right off the top of your head. We have the freedom to live where we like....as long as the local government does not decide our property would bring in more tax revenue as a strip mall or the environmentalists don’t label our land a protected habitat or a wetland. We have the freedom to say what we want....as long as it isn’t too loud for then we become subject to the rules of political correctness. God forbid someone may be ‘offended’. We have the freedom to travel.....as long as our vehicle is properly registered, we obey all the traffic laws and wear our seat belts. We have freedom of religion....as long as we aren’t to pushy about it, don’t wear the symbols of our religion in places they might ‘offend’ or move the display of our religion outside of culturally accepted norms. We do have the unbridled and unregulated freedom to choose between Cheerios and Frosted Flakes, cable and satellite, paper or plastic (except in San Francisco). We are free to watch porn on the Internet, drink ourselves into a stupor and listen to music that advocates bestiality, rape and murder. All certainly essential to our experience of freedom, don’t you agree?
What about some of the more important choices we make in our lives, how free are those? Educating our children, for instance. There is no question that the education and raising of our children is crucial to their well being and that of our society. And there are as many different opinions as to how to raise and educate children as there are parents but do parents have any real choices here? The fact is, those choices depend on your wealth. If you can’t afford to send your child to private school, you don’t have the freedom to choose a better public school. Your child will have to take his chances in a school that is failing to prepare children for the competitive global marketplace and is staffed by teachers good, bad and indifferent; it’s the roll of the dice for you.
How about retirement? Sure, we have the choice to save money in an IRA or play in the stock market but the money we play with is our government allowance. First, we must contribute our fourteen percent to Social Security, a retirement program with dismal returns. And for those of us under forty five, we wonder if we will see that money at all. We all know there is no real account in which our money sits and grows...slowly. It is simply a government promise, a promise made in the hope that after the Baby Boomers bankrupt the system, the government will somehow come up with the money to pay our promised benefits. Doing a simple risk analysis, is sure would be nice to take our fourteen percent and put it into something else for our retirement but that is not something we have the freedom to do.
What about my personal well being, my health care? Here again, our choices, for the moment, are limited by our income. For most, our choices are restricted by our insurance companies, the premiums for which are paid for out of our incomes after the government takes its money for Medicare and Medicaid. While we still have some choice in health care, those choices are rapidly eroding because of high costs directly related to the fact that insurance companies, government and private, have driven up the price to a point where those who desire to pay on their own can’t afford it.
It doesn’t have to be this way and my own recent experience proves this. I went to Wal Mart for an eye exam for new glasses and the exam was under fifty dollars. Because there was a questionable result, I was referred to an optometrist where I received the same exam with the same equipment, except for the taking of some pictures, and it cost over three hundred dollars, and that was with the cash discount. Within the same year, I ended up in the emergency room where I received an MRI and some painkillers. I was in there less time than I was for the eye exam and it was several thousand dollars. The bill for the two minutes I spent with the doctor, who was not even and MD but a physician’s assistant, was over five hundred dollars! That’s the equivalent of fifteen thousand dollars an hour! The difference between for profit, no insurance places like Wal Mart (also making available cheap prescriptions), Lasik, and even cosmetic surgery centers, and hospitals and clinics that take insurance, particularly government insurance, couldn’t be more stark. Same advanced equipment but the service is much better and the price is hardly comparable. That is because when insurance is involved, the customer is not the patient but the insurance company, they’re the one’s who pay. When no insurance is involved, it is the patient who is the customer and must be treated accordingly because they have a choice. They can take their dollars wherever they like, they don’t have an insurance company restricting their options.
However, despite the deficiencies in the system, there is a push to make it infinitely worse by putting the government in charge of the whole health care field and eliminating our choices, our freedom, all together. For some unknown reason, there are a lot of people who think putting a government bureaucrat in charge of their health care will actually make it better. We don’t even have to guess about how it will turn out. Look at Europe and Canada. Rationing, long waits and low quality are the hallmarks of every system. Is that what we really want? Do we want to give up our freedom over our health care knowing that it will get worse and not better?
What about our charity dollars, the money we give to those less fortunate than ourselves. Again, we are still free to give our government allowance to whatever charity we desire but the money the government takes from us for ‘charitable’ purposes is too often spent in ways most of us may object to. If it was our choice, would give our money for free needles to drug addicts, free condoms to the promiscuous, more money for every child produced by a welfare mother? Would we pour our money into programs that destroy the family and create dependency? I doubt it, but do we have the freedom to choose? No.
Over two hundred years ago a group of men arose who were tired of seeing a far away government tax and spend in ways that were not in their best interests. They saw a government taking away their freedoms one by one. They found themselves subject to a government that made decisions that caused economic harm. They pledged their lives to the elimination of such tyranny. The government in Washington and in many states has become that which we rebelled against, and much worse. Choice is the essence of freedom and liberty and we are rapidly losing the few important choices left to us. According to the founders, governments are instituted to secure our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The idea of government is that we, as free people, surrender some small and clearly defined portion of our sovereignty in order to create a level playing field and ensure that our liberty is not threatened either domestically or by some foreign entity.
For the last hundred years, our government has come to operate under the assumption that it, and not we, are responsible for our lives, liberties and pursuits. It is no longer the guardian of our liberty but the custodian of it. If our liberty and freedom were a box of candy, under the founder’s system we possessed the box and the government was like our big brother that kept others from taking our box. Under today’s system, we no longer posses the box. It is held by our mother who gives it out as she sees fit. Sometimes she can be liberal with it, sometimes stingy, but the point is that it is out of our control and we let it become so. Are we responsible adults or little children? Have we become so lazy and apathetic that we don’t really care about our choices, are we happy turning over all our responsibility to the government? If so, we have become mere slaves and the founder’s vision is dead, it only awaits the final nails in the coffin. But if we believe in liberty and the responsibility for our own choices that go with it, then it is time we stood up and said no more. It is time to say with Jefferson and the founders that the “long train of abuses and usurpations” that have led us to “absolute despotism” will end now or there will be a new revolution at hand. It is time that men and women of vision and conviction, “with a firm reliance on Divine Providence...pledge...our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” to the task.
Comments