One common chant that has well surpassed "cliche" status is the statement "freedom isn't free." However, like stereotypes, most cliches have a nugget of truth in them. Freedom is not, in fact, free and everyone wants to use that to justify their personal agenda.
How It's Misused
War! Don't like it? Those guys want to kill us all. I mean, come on: you know freedom isn't free.
Robin Hood! Don't like it? Well, you know you live in the freest country on Earth and you enjoy many fruits I would like to recast as part of the common bounty. After all... freedom isn't free.
Gay marriage! Don't like it? Hey! Protecting freedom of religious views means protecting everyone's perspective. If that makes you sad, well, freedom isn't free.
Sure, the people who utter these platitudes may not use the exact words. Sometimes they college them up and sometimes they country them down. The essence is always there, though, poisoning the argument and rotting away the little nugget's ability to do its job.
The Truth of It
It's true: freedom is not free but it's not the money we spend on social programs that would keep it safe. It's not the trampling of some six thousand year old religious tradition, either. The root of protecting freedom is not even the lives we lay down to protect ourselves from our enemies - although that is often a necessary component. At its core, protecting freedom depends on something a lot more rudimentary than any of those things.
What is actually required is the ability to think and to make the hard decisions. Mental laziness or plain old stupidity is the greatest enemy of freedom that we have and it lies at the heart of almost every threat there is. We need to radically rethink the way government conducts its affairs and we need to regain our ability to make the tough decisions.
The Problem
Representative government isn't working. It seems really hard to argue against that assertion. The problem with representative government is not, as the Left would argue, that the people's views aren't taken into account. It's also not, as the Right would argue, that it abandons our traditions. Also, neither of them are true.
Corporations control government because you and I let them. Corrupt politicians enter office because you and I let them. The products you buy are of terrible quality because you accept it. Your life is the way it is a little bit because of the circumstances around you and a lot because you let it be that way.
Representative government doesn't work because it gives people too much say, not too little. You get the government you deserve. You really do. Don't believe it? Tough. It's still true.
One-Vote-Per-Citizen Isn't Working
Representative government is an implementation, not a virtue. Like all previous means of controlling people's behavior, it is deeply flawed. We need to radically rethink how government makes its decisions and we need the ability to do the uncomfortable things that allow liberty to happen.
We need the ability to look at someone at say "sorry, you're too stupid... you don't get a say." However, it's not just people who
can't think that are the problem. It's also people who could think but
don't.
Of course, there is no "fair" way to tell someone they cannot vote. If you give someone the power to decide who can and cannot vote, that person is likely to distort whatever model he is given in order to obtain a favorable voting population.
We need to give people who are better decision-makers more relative voting strength than bad decision-makers and we need a way for people to sort themselves into the right voting-strength category.
A Next Step
I submit that there is a way to do this that simultaneously corrects the signal-to-noise ratio and makes people who care about something the ones who pay for it. There's a catch, though: you have to give up the easy answer.
You have to be willing to be brave enough to do it. You have to be willing to say "You can't vote? That's too bad. Maybe you should do something about that." You may even have to be willing to say "I can't vote? That's too bad. Maybe
I should do something about that."
I propose that people who don't even have their own lives in order should not be telling other people how to live. It is also my position that, if you, aren't willing to pay for a program or a war, then you don't really care enough about it to stop it.
So here's the solution, broken down into its different necessary components.
- Prohibit taxation of any kind in any amount by any level or branch of government.
- Prohibit voting of any kind other than the one specified at end of this list.
- Donations to the government can be made pending a the satisfaction of a condition.
- Every legislative proposal is resolved in so as to garner the largest total amount of conditional donations possible.
It's a Big Change
I know it's frightening. It's tough for a lot of people because it challenges so many of the ideas that are beaten into our heads from birth. The idea that everyone should get a say in how government works, for instance, is something that most people consider right and just. For some people, it's even more frightening because they wouldn't get a say in how government works.
The bottom line is this: If you're not able to see why the above proposal would work better than what we have now then you're exactly the reason why it would.
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