Liberty and freedom are rare in human history. Human instinct is not to yearn for liberty. Rather, humans yearn to be taken care of.
Liberty and freedom optimize outcomes
Freedom is hard. It requires self-discipline and self-reliance. Self-discipline and self-reliance are necessary components of independence. For this reason freedom is a value. It can be taught. It can be learned. But for a state or a nation to be free it must become a community value. Equally importantly, freedom must be a primary value in a society or the society will not thrive and prosper.
Freedom is good because it allows the maximum number of people to achieve at the highest levels they are able to attain. This optimizes the total output of the community. So where does freedom come from? Freedom is a right which comes from God. We are born with a right to it. No one, not man nor government can take it away. Each of us however must decide to embrace it. Unfortunately today too many of us don’t.
Generally, we want to be taken care of. Most often the promises of willingness to care for us come from government. The government promises to use other people’s money to take care of us. That works just fine until we run out of other people’s money. You see, the government does not make or sell anything. All it does is use police power to take from those who produce.
Living life or playing safe?
America’s founders knew that limited government, freedom, and liberty are key to a free society. We are now witnessing as Americans become more secular, they value liberty less and less. We value the pursuit of “safe” over virtually all other considerations. It is a life-suppressing focus. This is true for our individual lives, and it is true for the life of our society.
We are not on earth to be safe. Instead we are on earth to lead a full life. We seem to aspire to lead as safe a life as possible. The problem with this is we are setting as our life goal experiencing as little pain as possible. How sad is that? What does it contribute to the present or the future?
If we aim for 100% safety and no pain, you don’t live. Safe, as in “no risk,” doesn’t exist. Accepting there are degrees of safety and balancing risk with reward is part of priority setting in life. All of life confronts you with this question: Are you going to take risks or play it safe?
If you play it safe, you don’t get married. If you play it safe, you don’t have kids. Safe these days is used to suppress freedom of thought. Safe has become a dirty word. Most of life is not major moments. Safe is going to suppress your joy of life. If you want to lead a good life, a full life, you cannot keep asking, “Is it safe?”
When we take action for a stated reason and the reason goes away…
We have gone crazy on the safe issue. It is making New Hampshire a police state. That’s the worry: In the name of safety, we are dropping all other considerations. “Is it safe?” shouldn’t be the overarching element in our lives.
Governor Sununu, your state of emergency declaration was based on fear not fact. You were afraid New Hampshire’s hospitals would be overwhelmed. Guess what. We are approaching 3 months of complete tyranny. We have not exceeded 10% of the capacity of the hospitals.
Stop rationalizing your position. Admit you made a mistake. You are overplaying your hand. We have laid off healthcare professionals and are damaging the economy of the state. We are killing businesses. Enough is enough. Excellency, Let my people go.