Friday, September 28, 2012

Demand Freedom, not Free Stuff

"I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. That is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can re-establish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very distinct curtailment of our liberty."

President Calvin Coolidge in his 1925 inaugural address

In these days of political discourse, I am amazed at the number of people who are still worshipping at the feet of some political party or the other, mostly the other. While a significant number of people have "awakened," (become aware that the whole political system is a scam and that most politicians are bought and paid for by corporate interests, mostly banks and the financial sector, and couldn't care less about you) there are still those zombies walking around out there spouting fear based propaganda (i.e., talking points) and insisting that everything will get better if only their guy is granted control of the magical scepter of power.

Those who pimp one party or the other (mostly the other) simply will not admit to themselves that the whole system is broken and corrupt (especially their own party), that voting solves nothing, and that they're going to have to personally do something more than take a trip to the polling place every four year years in order to change things for the better. They may have to come to the conclusion that they're going to have to grow up sooner rather than later because there may soon be no one else there to take care of them.

I contend that the answer to many, if not all, of our societal problems is freedom. It's important to understand the concept I'm trying to get across here, as freedom means different things to different people. I define freedom as a state of human condition where one is in charge of his own destiny and is therefore independent of coercive influences. In order to be truly free certain criteria must be met. As I go over those criteria you may find that, by my definition, the vast majority of Americans are not free. Indeed, we may all be encumbered in some way, shape or form, but if the encumbrance was sought voluntarily it's different than having it forced upon one's self. The difference is in degrees and history has shown us that the freer a people are, the more productive, prosperous and by some measures the more happy they are.

There are many people who are fearful of freedom. They fear either not having anyone there to take care of them when they are in need, or the retribution that may be sought by angry mobs who are not being taken care of, among other things. This is the politics of fear, and it is very divisive. It pits one group of people against another and takes the focus away from the real culprits and issues that should concern us all.

People who promote these politics will talk about things like free food for the poor, free healthcare, free telephones, free rides, free this and free that. They will make the claim that people have a right to these "basic necessities," that providing such necessities is the duty of an advanced free society. These lofty goals may be good, but is government force really the way to go about achieving them? Is stealing from one class of people to give to another class moral? I think not. Extortion, even under the guise of taxation and justified by a moral cause and good intentions, is an immoral way to provide for those less fortunate. To "give" free things to one class is to enslave another. When one advocates freedom, one advocates the abolition of all types of slavery.

I keep hearing about percentages. There's the 99% and the 47% which means they're pitted against the 1% and the 53%. Is this how we really want to limit our society, by having a certain percentage pitted against another certain percentage? Do we want to fall into that mind trap? Do we want to be so immersed in group think that we forget we are all individuals with individual needs, wants and desires? Do we really want to exude hatred toward another group who have worked hard and made the most of their opportunities rather than joining together and concentrating on the group that has systematically and incrementally removed opportunity for all over the decades? Have we become a society of slaves blaming other slaves and ignoring the masters?

Here's a little history. The modern day income tax was first employed in this nation in 1913, the same year the Federal Reserve System was created. Coincidence? I think not. Back then, it was supposed to tax only the top 1% of income earners. 1%, sound familiar? Back then, the top 1% was anyone earning more than $14,000 per year. You wanna talk about inflation? Nobody cared much because, I mean, what the heck, it only affected the top 1% and who gives a crap about any of them, right?

So, incrementally, little by little as time passed, the burden of income taxes was spread to the lower income earners because everyone needs to pay their "fair share" until today when most every worker, most every laborer, has taxes taken directly from their paycheck and then they have to take the time out of their own busy lives or pay someone else to do government paperwork so they can get their own money back. What kind of craziness is this? Now, 100 years later, income taxes affect just about everyone. And, here's the kicker, the only people who really benefit from the income tax are the central bankers as just enough income taxes are collected to pay off the interest on the national debt. How about that? So this 53% against 47% BS is just a smokescreen to keep people from seeing the real issue, the issue of who's really getting the money.

I have a solution for all this rhetoric splitting us into percentages, this crap that makes people want to check out what's in others' pockets. How about "we" have 100% of the population not paying income taxes? How about "we" admit to ourselves that income taxes are extortion and "we" have all been taken advantage of by a group of central banking thugs? How about "we" stop being a certain percentage debt slaves laboring for the federal government a certain percentage of the year (there's a reason they call it "tax freedom day")? How about "we" stop worrying about what will happen to us if "we" refuse to pay our income taxes? Maybe then 100% of us would have nothing to gripe about and we'd all stop worrying about who pays what to whom.

There's another lesson we can learn from history. That lesson is the freer a society, the more it prospers, the more authoritarian a society, the more it deteriorates into chaos. This can be looked at another way. The more society thinks in terms of individual rights, the more it prospers, the more it thinks in terms of group rights, the more morally bankrupt it becomes. Perhaps this is because when men are free society has a tendency to look at things from a more loving point of view, but when men are enslaved by the chains of government dictates, especially a highly centralized, authoritarian government, society has a tendency to look at things from a more fearful point of view.

All major religions have their version of the golden rule, treat others as you would treat yourself. So, if you want to be free, you have to allow others to be free. If you want to make decisions for your own life, you have to allow others to make decisions, however bad or wrong you may think they are, for their own lives. If you want to keep all the money you earn and decide where to spend it, you have to let others keep all the money they earn and let them decide where to spend it.

Free stuff is not free. It comes at the price of dependency. It comes at the cost of moral degradation as society as a whole comes to believe that theft and extortion are moral ways to go about taking care of business. Whether you are a welfare mom or a weapons dealer on corporate welfare, you are dependent on an immoral system that takes money in an involuntary manner. A free society might sound scary, but when you look at them historically you might come to the realization that the fear factor comes not from an historical basis, but is based upon propaganda from those who stand to benefit from creating a more collectivist way of life.

We would all be better off if we could whittle down the federal government. We would all do much better if the federal government was scaled back to a Constitutionally limited size. To do this some people need to realize that freedom does not mean free stuff. If we are to have freedom we need to stop asking the government for favors and start taking care of ourselves and our neighbors. We need to tell government to stop using the money given to them to socially engineer society. We need to decentralize government and bring politics closer to home and community where politicians can be more easily held accountable. We need to demand freedom, not free stuff. We need to deny consent.

My archives can be found at my website szandorblestman.com. Please visit there to read more and support me by making a donation.

For a time my books will be available exclusively at Amazon.com from Kindle Direct Publishing. As a special offer, for those of you who may have missed it the first time, on Oct. 3rd, Oct. 4th and Oct. 10th, 2012, the full versions of all my ebooks will be available for free to download. Please help support me by downloading my ebooks for free on those days. The more downloads I get, the better. Tell your friends. If you don't have a Kindle, amazon.com offers a PC version for free. Please download and enjoy.

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy

The Edge of Sanity

The Ouijiers

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