Life, Liberty,...and Property

In one of his earlier drafts of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson had defined the unalienable rights as: Life, Liberty, and Property. That, among other things got changed in the rewrite. But it speaks to the importance of economic freedom being linked with political and personal freedom. To quote Ronald Reagan, announcing America’s Economic Bill of Rights (July 3, 1987):

“Inextricably linked to these political freedoms are protections for the economic freedoms envisioned by those Americans who went before us. While the Constitution sets our political freedoms in greater detail, these economic freedoms are part and parcel of it.”

In essence, there can be no political freedom without corresponding economic freedom.

The only essential role of government is to protect the right of the individual from the tyranny of the collective. Too bad the various governments, led by the sycophants of Imperial Washington, don't have a clue about protecting individual rights. Instead, they continue to usurp freedoms. Obviously, we're going to hit the economic ones.

First, there's eminent domain. That's where the government takes your land for the greater good. At least they pay you. But the idea is that the government can mandate this.

Even worse is government controlling what you can do on your land. You have your city and county ordinances. Not terrible, but annoying. You have some state shit. Also annoying, and sometimes invasive. But our federal albatross takes the cake. From mindless wetland regulations to protecting the rights of albino spotted zorgylflex salamanders and the emotionally complex trees, there are all kinds of regulations used to restrict property rights. So instead of being able to clear a ditch that got plugged and filled up, a property owner may have his land rendered useless because some slug or bug on the endangered species list decided to mate there. This is proof that a bucket of coal oil and a match can clean up messy problems. Boom.

For personal property, we have agencies that regulate our clothes, our electronics, our toys, medicine, our weapons, our food, and the airwaves. And they're still trying to see how they can reach a decrepit hand into cyberspace. Now while all of these agencies do have some value, some importance, and some justification, they make the list because, with too much power to take those decisions on themselves, we lose our freedom to choose. So we get the lighter with the annoying-assed child safety device, the garage door sensor that has to be installed, the myriad things designed to save the planet from whatever the climate change flavor of the year is, the flashlight with a safety instruction book that had to kill a whole forest just for the number of books produced to tell us not to piss in it before inserting the batteries, and the justification to whittle away rights defined in the Constitution in the name of protecting people.

Then there's restrictions on what you do with your money when you try to buy free speech and empower your choice of representative. You're limited to what you can buy, how mych you can buy, even when you can buy. Of course, with politics, this means finding every loophole, cheat, and bendable law imaginable, instead of just a transparent system that lets everyone spend and speak freely. No politician who would make things so inane should even be nominated for a high office. Wait. Didn't somebody pretty much do that already? Oh wait, he's not nominated yet.

Okay, that leaves the granddaddy of them all, that systemic rape of your wallet and mine, taxes. I'm sure I'll miss a few here, but this is a blog, not a book. We start with federal, state, and local income taxes. You have Social Security and Medicare taxes. State and local sales taxes. Corporate taxes, which we pay every time we buy something, because those corporations certainly don't pay taxes. We have property taxes, then taxes on money from selling the home. We have sin taxes, from cigarettes, to liquor, to fatty foods out in Cali. We have gas taxes, death taxes, and (coming soon) carbon taxes. And any company that makes too much money, we just raise their taxes (which they pass right back to us). But it's okay, really. After all, it is our money. Why should we decide what to do with that, when there are plenty of great and glorious things government can do with it, at ten times the price. Any wonder why I'm always dropping links for the FairTax every time?

In the end, our political and personal freedoms are intrinsically linked to our economic freedom. And as economic freedom is stripped away, all freedoms are diminished.