© 2007 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.
“One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.” – Thomas Reed, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives
At election time we see the real face of our government. Hidden in bumper stickers, slick advertisements and candidate signs is the underbelly of the tyranny beast. The majority of those running for office think their job is to compel citizens to do things they normally would not.
Candidates do not say out loud, “If elected I will make you citizens do things you do not want to do.” That is just what happens. Louisiana Sen. Russell Long had a saying, “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that other man behind the tree.”
How far would Long have gone if he had run on the promise to raise taxes for the very voters who put him in office? But we end up somehow being those other people when taxes are levied.
There would be no need for laws if we all agreed on exactly what people should do. But that’s the rub. The very foundation of government is control. The battle is always government versus liberty.
President Thomas Jefferson wrote, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” This means that, as government control over people’s lives increases, citizen personal liberty decreases. When a citizen’s ability to act with independence is taken away, so goes the liberty of that citizen.
Candidates for office know where they want to start, but do they know when they have gone too far? Every election is about government control over our lives – how far is too far? There are always pressures to control citizen behavior, not just rape and murder, but also appearance and irritation. For example, local legislation is increasingly dictating a groupthink for acceptable neighborhood appearance standards.
I realize an organized society must have rules of conduct and I expect to lose some of my liberty as I live amid a society. Airplanes land into the wind for reasons of physics; Americans drive on the right by reasons of societal agreement.
Not all laws are wrong; rather, my concern is about the increasing number of laws every year that chip away, little by little, at our overall liberty. I would like to see the winning candidates be those who will protect liberty. Each election finds candidates who want to stop what citizens can do and candidates who will stay the increased rules and regulations.
We must restrain government
Our hope as a free people must lie in the restraint of government. Thousands upon thousands of new rules are passed by local, state and national lawmakers and are topped off by bureaucratic rulemaking. No citizen can know all the laws, which leads to selective enforcement. Further, each time government jousts with a citizen, we as a nation move further toward tyranny.
In last week’s column I mentioned that forced payment for recycling was not high on my list of what a government should do. From the response, I find that recycling is a high priority with some candidates. They are supported by people who think, “I recycle. I think everyone should. My neighbor does not. I will get the government to first force them to pay for recycling. Then the local government will eventually force them to recycle as I think they should.”
I will devote another column to recycling, but it indicates one way a candidate for office can run on the ticket of making people do what they do not want to do. The recycling people are free to recycle now; their push is to make everyone do it.
Nowhere in my discussion are we talking about the immediate safety of the community, but we can see the effect of political correctness in the conceal-carry discussion. Some people have found that the police response time is such that it would appear if they want to defend themselves, they must have immediate access to firearms since criminals are armed.
This is an area where some legislators say that citizens who fear for their safety should not be given the tools of defense. New Mexico passed a conceal-carry law. Thousands of New Mexicans conceal-carry and it has resulted in at least one criminal being shot to death to save a woman’s life. She is only alive today because of that law.
Some people want to leave endangered species. I will vote for candidates who will leave individual liberty for them.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.