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We Americans have been taught that safety and security should be the highest goals of our lives. You should strive to work a “safe job” with “good benefits” so you can raise your children in the same fashion, perpetuating the cycle of excruciating mundanity until the guys you pay for your security cause the nuclear destruction of the civilized world. All of the people who fought for what the United States originally was would be appalled at this state of affairs. You should be absolutely terrified of everything done in the names of safety and security, not because they might physically harm you but because they reduce your value in the universe.

It is disturbing how few people understand what freedom means now. You should have the right to live your life as you see fit as long as it doesn’t interfere with the lives of others. I haven’t ever seen anyone coherently argue against that principle, but the vast majority of political figures trample all over it throughout their careers. You should have the freedom not to subscribe to someone else’s idea of what is “right” or “good”. You should have the freedom to create and maintain your own wealth without nonsensical restrictions. Most of all though, you should have the freedom to manage your own life and make your own choices. It is patently absurd to argue that anyone other than you should be responsible for your own health, wealth or happiness. No one else owes you anything. You are not magically special and thus deserving of free medical care or free income because you are alive or because you live on a certain continent.

Which is the better society? The one that has tens of billions of people all relying on one another to maintain the pursuit of one dreadfully pedestrian goal — staying alive, or the society with billions of people struggling, fighting, achieving, creating and conquering new endeavors? Should we merely subsist in relative squalor just so we can see another sunrise or should we be investing, creating, challenging and exploring out into the depths of space?

While you are busy playing your video games or driving your kids to soccer practice the government you live under is running your life. Who decides what you can eat? Who decides which medicines you can use? Who tells you which countries’ products you are allowed to buy and at how much of a markup? Who is in charge of nearly every major detail of your life and is doing a crappy job at managing it? And who’s asking you to foot the bill? That’s all harmless enough, right? We should have food and drug regulators to make us safer and trade regulations to make things fair for producers in our country.

We should also have cameras on every corner and in every street to give us the security we so desperately need. We should be told where we can go, when we can go and how fast we can go on the way there. To make us safer, the contents of our pockets and purses should be known at all times, lest we stab a fellow unsuspecting sheep in the neck with our nail clippers. It is for your own safety that you are a suspect in a perpetual criminal investigation across all continents for crimes that not only haven’t been committed but haven’t even been defined.

Thank you for the privilege of defending myself with nothing more than pitiful pleading against the criminal who has me at gunpoint; the weapon stolen and the motive to earn more money than his free monthly income check from the government that I pay nearly half of my earned wages for so he can have enough money to purchase illegal drugs from the peaceful guy who is soon to be serving fifteen to twenty for breaking a law that I don’t agree with while the people who wrote the law molest someone else’s child and show up to work only to vote for an illegal war that I am required to fund despite its blatant absurdity and immeasurable negative effects on the rest of the civilized world. It’s great.

Or maybe I should take the opposite tack. What if I don’t particularly want that privilege? What if I, like the very founders of this nation, want to live my life under my own control, away from the tyranny of values enforced by the sleaziest bidder? I’d rather have the best people giving me advice because it is in their best interest than the only people who are allowed to give me advice about what is best for the “greater good” or the political agenda of some pale wrinkly aristocrat who wouldn’t know ingenuity or progress if it stripped away all of his liberties and forced him to work for a corrupt system under a corrupt government while telling him that the greatest good can be found at his local Ford dealer with zero down and low monthly payments just so he can see the sun rise one more time in his pitiful excuse for human existence. Step down from your podium, get out of my wallet and get away from my children¹. Vote for Ron Paul.

1. It’s probably worth noting that I don’t have children of my own, but the sentiment remains. ↩