Do you believe you’re capable of making decisions for yourself, or do you need someone to tell you how to live your life?

Do you believe you’re capable of deciding how to manage your money, or do you need someone to take it from you to spend as they see fit?

Do you believe you can act in a responsible fashion, or do you need someone dictating every detail of how you must behave?

Do you belive that you can be responsible for your actions, or do you need someone to protect you from any risk or liability?

Do you believe you are an Individual, posessing a body, a mind, and the rights to determine the disposition thereof, or do you think that your simply a coveniently intelligent automaton intended to carry out the wishes of a self-appointed oligarchy?

Do you believe that your purpose in life is for you to determine and execute, or are you such a directionless, vacant being that the only meaning you can find has to be prescribed to you?

How do you think your government would answer these questions about you?

This is a response to ShamedJedi’s video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVo54LGLkX8

The Constitution guarantees very few rights to the people. Instead, it explicitly enumerates what the federal government is allowed to do and reserves everything else for the states to decide (see the tenth amendment). It does not guarantee a right to practice free market capitalism any more than it guarantees a right for you to brush your teeth. Instead, it says that it’s not up to the federal government to decide how the markets function nor how you practice your personal hygiene (see the ninth amendment).

The ninth and tenth amendments are tiny: just two sentences combined. I’m sure it’s very easy to overlook them. Just ask our government. It’s the willful ignorance of these fundamental blocks of our constitution that have lead us to our current crisis. Further perverting them will not make it better.

If you’re going to target free market capitalism as the culprit for a problem, please be sure that free market capitalism is taking place first. If we’re talking about almost any aspect of the US economy, it clearly isn’t. The government believes that it has the intelligence and foresight (as well as the mandate, apparently) to meddle in a system of incomprehensible dynamic complexity driven by innumerable internal forces and know what the outcome will be. They are always proven wrong.

Free market capitalism has nothing to do with the current health care industry. The industry is wrapped up so tightly in government regulation and government/corporate cronyism that even basic free market principles like supply and demand simply can’t function. The government has this pervasive idea that by forcing out free market principles they will be able to change how the market acts, but their expectations of the effects are fallaciously presupposed on free market reactions. You can’t remove something from the free market and expect it to behave as if it were still in it. For example, emergency rooms are required by law to provide service to anyone, even if they can’t pay; that is so opposed to free market capitalism that it has had the opposite of the intended effect. Instead of guaranteeing service to the few who need emergency service but can’t pay for it, hospitals have closed their emergency rooms, denying the service even to those who could pay.

The problem of the working poor is also exacerbated by government regulation. Minimum wage is supposed to guarantee a livable wage to any worker, eliminating the working poor; instead what it does is eliminate low end jobs, increase prices across the board, and drive down real wages for everyone else.

It would take a considerable feat of ignorance to assume that further government involvement in the health care system would give any better results.

A free market is the best option to regulate the health care industry because it provides the most efficiently democratic means possible. Every individual votes with their money as to how their health care is to be provided and who provides it; it’s not dictated to them from above. The free market does several things well that governments cannot, among them innovation, price reduction, and specialization. It seems these three things would be invaluable to health care consumers. Perhaps our solution to the health care crisis should be to remove all national healthcare policies and actually try free market capitalism.

Power is like a gravity well in space. It draws everything towards it, big and small, and everything it captures makes the force stronger. It reaches further and pulls harder; escaping it requires more and more energy. Eventually it becomes so massive that nothing can be free of its grasp.

Remember: everything you give up to those in power only helps to strengthen them and weaken yourself.

You are the only one who is guaranteed to be watching out for your interests. No matter what they say, those over you are interested in preserving and increasing themselves. It’s human nature, and overlooking it out of faith or ignorance is a guaranteed loosing bet. Trusting them will always turn out a disappointment; at best, your interests will align for a time, only for you to be let down later. At worst, they’re flat out lying to your face and you will have paid your half of the bargain and gotten nothing in return.

Take a step back and look at what you’re giving up in the hope of getting something in back. Take gay marriage for instance. We fight with each other over preserving tradition or expanding civil rights. This is just as the powerful would like it, as the lines have been drawn and no one chooses to look up and say, “Why should my choice of who to love and unite with be the government’s business at all?” We are individuals and citizens; that should be enough in the government’s eye. In our drive to force everyone else to do the “right” thing, we’ve instead handed over the very right to determine one of the most personal decisions in our life! The same can be said of any number of things. We debate taxes, healthcare reform, and legalizing drugs, but nobody realizes that by giving the power for these decisions to the government in the first place, they’ve already lost far more than they hope to gain.

There is only one unbounded power in America: the government. If a corporation gets out of hand, the government can reign them in. If a foreign power becomes aggressive, the government is there to intervene. But who’s there to keep the government in bounds? The three branches? They’ve each shown that they’re more interested in increasing their own power rather than limiting the others. The voting public? They’re the ones who enthusiastically trade freedom for ease at every opportunity. They’re not about to turn their backs on their “benefactors”. Like a black hole, the government’s power will grow inexorably, building on itself, crushing everything around it in a mindless drive to consume. So will you continue fighting those next to you over whether to go left or right, or will try to convince them that the best direction is away?

I merely wish to be allowed to live my life, yet I am confronted every day by the unrelenting forces of the powers that be, pressing from every side, forming the vast diversity of humanity into the perfectly uniform cube of the ideal citizen: pliant, productive, and powerless.

My desires are few and have been enumerated many times before: I wish to have the right to think and converse as I will, with whom I will, in the manner I will; I wish to have the right to live my life free of undue external influence; I wish to have the right to mainrain my rights. These wishes, reasonable and understandable, desirable and honorable, proclaimed and professed, have proven themselves too much to bear for a powerfully-minded few and a weakly-willed many.

I do not proclaim the way of the anarchist. Chaos is both unnatural and untennable. I do not proclaim the way of the socialist, facist, or communist. Power will always draw more to itself; deliberately concentrating it is welcoming your bondage with open arms. I do not profess democracy. Governance by the lowest common denomenator is every bit as foolish as it sounds.

Instead, I propose the notion of liberty. I propose a society built not on freedoms, as they are given and likewise taken away, but on freedom itself, on the understanding that there is nothing a law can do to a man but enslave him; there is nothing one individual can do to another but bind him; there is nothing a governance can do but restrict its citizenry. I propose a system where there are no freedoms to grant, because all freedom is granted. I propose a place where law is constructed literally by the people, few, many, or all, and applied likewise as they choose to suubmit to their own governance. I propose a nation not where power is forbade, but where no man or men by their own decree may compel their will upon others.

I am not a revolutionary or an agitator, a hippie or a Nazi, a theologian or a scholar. I am not a man of extremes. I believe I am a reasonable man realizing an increasingly unreasonable situation, and I wish to find a solution.