Freedom
From AboveTheGarage
It's tough to write about freedom without coming across as a tin-foil hat person. I know, because I've tried it in a couple of private forums. And let's face it - we're still relatively free in this country so it could easily sound like sour grapes.
But nonetheless our freedom is eroding. And in some strange, non-obvious ways. As I write this in 2010 one of the great freedoms of this country, the freedom to live where you want, has been hugely curtailed for many people by the housing bubble. A lot of people simply can't move because they are trapped in their homes! How strange is that?
How a bill becomes a law
I'll put on my tin-foil hat and just say that democracy isn't working out. The Founding Fathers, who were brilliant, left a couple of loopholes in the constitution. It took years for the bureaucrats to figure them out but they are on a roll now!
For instance, you probably learned about how a bill becomes a law in grade school.
But it's nothing like that. The one key thing on that chart is this:
- BILL IS DRAFTED
- Members of Congress, the Executive Branch,
- and even outside groups can draft (write or
- draw up) bills.
Of course, it's great that the citizenry can propose a bill. But realistically, who has the resources?
Some bills are thousands of pages long. Your representative, I promise you, has not read the whole thing. Almost no one has.
And yet they vote! If they were honest, every bill would be voted down for the simple reason that your representative has not read it. Shouldn't that be a requirement before voting on it? Is that unreasonable? Does saying that require me to put on my tin foil hat?
The people with the resources to draft a bill are the very people that the bill is meant to regulate.
As a result, the "law books" are now hundreds of volumes.
Nobody can understand it. Isn't the law meant to help us act civilized? How can it if it is incomprehensible?
The Founding Fathers, of course, thought of this, and that's why we have the third, judicial, branch of government. And that's worked pretty well! But what the Founding Fathers never anticipated was a Denial of Service (DOS) or a spam-attack on the Supreme Court. But that's how it is. The Supreme Court doesn't have the resources to keep up with every bill and review it. They only review a few things each year and those cases need to be brought to the court.
So each year a zillion special interest groups get more handouts and bailouts written into the United State Code.
Conservatives used to complain that it was the welfare state that was going to destroy our country - that giving handouts to the poor discouraged work and encouraged laziness. As if those lazy good-for-nothing bums in the street were capable of organizing and getting their elected representatives to create a welfare system.
What actually has happened is that the handouts are going to the rich. This has always been the case - the main beneficiaries of the welfare state are not the homeless - sure, they get food-stamps, but who gets the money? Your local supermarket. Who is going to benefit the most from health-care legislation? Insurance companies and hospitals and big pharmaceutical companies. This isn't conspiracy theory - it's just what is happening. How could anything else happen? It's the hospitals and insurance companies and the big pharma companies that have the resources to write 1,500 page laws that are in their own best interest.
So I don't have a fix handy ... maybe switching to super-majority voting will help reduce the clutter of new laws.
But don't you believe it when you hear that it's welfare per se that is driving our government into insolvency. It's special interests and if those special interests can get you behind their personal cause by promising something for nothing, then they will. But it's a deal with the devil and you'll be getting the short end of stick.
The key to it all
From: [1]
- Daily Bell: Is it reasonable to believe that the state will ever wither away or does reality instruct us that the best that can be done is to limit its power?
- Rockwell: To me, that's like asking if we can imagine a society without robberies and murders. Maybe it won't ever happen, but we must have the ideal in mind or else we'll never get closer to it. Without the ideal, progress stops. To some extent, then, whether reality will finally ever conform is not the critical question. What counts is what we imagine can and should exist. I like to imagine a society without legally sanctioned aggression against person and property.
(Emphasis added.)
I had a hard time understanding why governments continue to grow when it is obviously in everyone's best interest to be free.
The reason for the growth of government finally clicked when I listened to this podcast:
If I might summarize one point Dr. Hoppe makes ...
- The state has a monopoly on the use of force.
I don't know about you, but it has always made perfect sense to me that this should be so. Who wants anarchy, where anyone can shoot anyone else any time they want? Surely we must have a central authority that controls violence.
But the problem with a state monopoly on violence is simply this: instead of fighting each other over disagreements, people start to fight over the much more valuable control of the monopoly on violence. In other words, the fight begins over control of the state. And so no real problem has been solved: instead, we've just moved whatever distributed violence might occur from time to time and centralized it in a high stakes battle for control of the whole political machine.
In the US, this fight for control was meant to be made reasonable by the structure of our government, but obviously the special interests have seen the way to perverting the system for their own benefit. And the rest of us can't afford, generally, to fight those interests.
So this is the problem: it's perfectly obvious to everyone we need central control over violence to prevent anarchy; and the alternative of Old West style justice is just too scary to contemplate. So we continue to centralize control. In fact, there would be much less violence overall if we went back to a distributed justice system without central control but that is a very hard case to make. Dr. Hoppe does a decent job of talking through the issues in the podcast I mentioned above but it takes an hour and a half of careful listening to get the idea across. There is no simple sound bite for Freedom.
So things are continuing to slowly degenerate, particularly on the economic front, as the Goldman Sachs and JP Morgans of the world fight for control of the state monopoly while the rest of us sit on the sidelines and watch.
The fix is simple: remove the state monopoly on violence. The fix is also hard in that it would require enormous education of the American people about how systems evolve and how they fail. I don't know that we'll have a Thomas Paine who can write a "Common Sense" that catches on. I know many have tried to recreate that magic. But at this point, given the public education in statism that nearly every American receives seemingly for free, it's hard to imagine an educational effort that can overcome the statist mind set.
But there is hope ... college students around America understand that their own country is bankrupt, that there will be no social security or medicare for them ... some even chant "End the Fed" because they realize that printing money is not the solution to anything.
There is hope.
