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The Necessity of a Firewall

Let us be clear: as the Declaration of Independence states, you are born into this world with the God-given rights you need to fulfill your life. You have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As a check against government encroachment, these are rights are further defined and defended in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and subsequent amendments.

Exercising these rights, you have the ability and indeed the duty to make your own choices, form your own associations, choose your friends, help one another and receive help, and in short organize your life to fulfill it as you see fit.

Trouble begins when government burdens you with obligations that you did not choose and are not allowed to reject. The problem here is two-fold: it takes away liberties and it erodes a sense of personal responsibility, both for yourself and for your fellow man. One the one hand one comes to think, “he is not my problem – the government will handle it” – or worse – “my own decisions are not my problem – the government will rescue me from them.” On the other hand the government comes to conclude that it is necessary for your happiness, that your rights are secondary to its own power and perpetuation, and that human life itself is a fungible commodity to be manipulated and massaged to promote some abstract greater good.

By nature people are greedy. Government is greed backed by power and a pretense of moral authority. The firewall I propose is to vote to protect economic and civil liberties from government greed – i.e., from the biggest, hungriest, best-organized, and most self-righteous bully on the block. You have the right to protect yourself from a burglar, but where is the firewall that protects you from the government? If someone steals from your house, you can take them to court. If the endless government crusade for the greater good takes the fruits of your labors and gives them out to people who do not want to live by the consequences of their own actions, it is advancing its own power precisely by diminishing your freedom and the desire of the recipient to improve him/herself. It is a two pronged attack not only on your financial security but on the principles that build prosperity and independence – the desire to live and associate freely in order to better oneself and one’s community.

Government has legitimate ends, and these are prescribed in the Constitution. Beyond these, it undertakes many moral crusades which, whether they be noble, foolhardy, fruitful, or vain, are left to the states. My simple argument is that the primary duty of a Congressman representing a state in the federal government is not to beg for pennies back from the dollars sent in to the treasury, but to allow citizens to keep those dollars to begin with, and to allow states to order themselves as they see fit, to manage taxes and policies locally, and not to have to jump through endless reams of paperwork and the infinite hoops of various alphabet agencies in order to build a road, fund a school, write a curriculum, build a refinery, drill a well, and so on.

When a person tells you that this is not possible in this day and age, the response is that human nature has not changed since 1776, or 76 BC, and that this day and age presents us with a pressing need for people to learn to organize themselves for freedom as efficiently as they have organized to abdicate responsibility.

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