Skip, true. It is about freedom, but there’s more to it than that. I would suggest that state encroachment on individual liberties is a symptom of the problem and not the problem itself. It’s about the people. It’s about people willing to cede their liberty and freedom to a faceless bureaucrat in exchange for the illusion of safety, for a handout, or both. It’s the values that people hold that they place themselves as a pet of the state; they willingly devolve themselves into the Burkean “flies of a summer”.
We’ve raised generations steeped in state dependency, and now we see the result of this societal mistake when there’s a problem. When there’s a problem or a challenge, the first reaction of too many people is to call in the Department of Personal Responsibility Absolution to handle it. They believe that they themselves are uncapable of handling the problem, that it’s somebody else’s responsibility. If there are poor people, the government should handle it. If there are sick people, government should handle it. Elderly, the government should care for them.
This is the mindset of the Left. This is why we get such acrid vitriol from the Left when we want to cut government. They immediately translate that into: if there’s less government no one will help the sick, poor, elderly etc. It never dawns on them, at least the honest ones, that historically these things were handled outside of the state by churches, charities, local municipalities, friends, and families. But personal responsibility to yourself, to your neighbor, and to your community is taxing and messy, right? If they accept this historical approach to handling problems, that means they must turn off the X-Box, fold up their lawn chair, or abandon their sofa because they’re on call. Fooey, they say, call in Big Gov, it’s easier!
Too many unquestioningly accept the delusion of a government guarantee. We hear it all the time. For example in the justification for Social Security vs individual private investments, Big Gov types argue that senior citizens will be street poor because individual investments may fail. It doesn’t occur to them that Social Security will be insolvent, and that it already coerced money from the citizen who will eventually need it and now it’s gone. They ignore that unpleasantry. When government makes a mistake, no matter how egregious, it offers the Big Gov types personal absolution. They blame someone else, the government. Then in response to the mistake, they argue for increasing the governments responsibility for handling the mistake. The same government that was responsible for the mistake in the first place. It’s an absolution of personal responsibility. The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen, the smaller the liberty.
This is what rots a culture; desiccates and decays a society. When you grow dependant on the state to tell you what kind of toilet you must use, what kind of light bulb you must buy, what size of soda you’re allowed to drink, why not believe that the state must have a say when opening a lemonade stand?
If people don’t angrily denounce, decry, and ultimately ignore the state and its regulatory henchmen when they force a little girl to stop selling lemonade, what’s going to happen when the state decides it can insert itself into something truly invidious and force you to give up your property rights, your free speech, your personal liberty? It’s the people that must not stay silent and must protect liberty. It’s the people that are the problem, and the people that must fix it. It’s the people that matter.