Freedom I: The essence of America – SalemNews.net

If you ask around the country, or around the world for that matter, what one word exemplifies the essence of America? What word best describes what America represents? What single concept is etched in our constitutional DNA? It would be freedom!

It was the quest for freedom that inspired a group of colonists to fight for and create a new nation. It is the idea of freedom that was pervasive in every word written into our founding documents. It was the desire to perpetuate freedom that lead to the creation of our unique system of government with its singular responsibility to defend our freedom from enemies both foreign and domestic. There cannot be a reference to America that doesnt contain the underlying principle of freedom.

Why then have we strayed so far from that most fundamental founding principle? We are no longer free to conduct our lives as we see fit. There are at least 5,000 federal criminal laws. There are so many regulations that can be enforced criminally. They cannot even be counted but the number is estimated to be in the tens of thousands. And that doesnt account for all the state and local laws. Each of these laws and regulations is a little bit of our freedom stolen from us.

Now I am not an anarchist who believes there should be no law. I believe that we should be free to go about our lives as long as we do not harm or violate the rights of someone else. John Stuart Mill, author of the classic treatise On Liberty wrote: The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized society, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. In other words, the legitimate role of government in a free society should be restricted to ensuring that only those offenses that injure another person should be purview of government force.

At one time, freedom was defined as the absence of coercion. The Progressive Era brought about an expanded definition as it applies to government, the freedom from want. If you believe that the federal government exists as originally intended, for the explicit purpose protecting your rights, then the pursuit of freedom from want has no place in governments role in our free society.

The Framers knew if they were to provide something to someone, that benefit could be used as an excuse, no matter how illegitimate, to impose the governments will upon not only the recipient but the population en masse, which is exactly what has happened. That is why the Framers where adamant that the central government be given no power or responsibility to provide goods and services beyond safety, defense, and a few to promote the economy and trade. The Framers went even further to explicitly limit the power of the federal government to eighteen enumerated powers. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution defines the governmental guardrails meant to keep the federal government from veering into areas they have no authority to venture.

It is the application of the freedom from want that has provided pseudo-justification for the government inserting itself into every aspect of our daily lives. If someone or something provides you with a good or service, is it not reasonable to expect that the provider would want you to behave in a manner that would not exacerbate your want or need for that good or service? And if the service provider is government, they can impose that behavior modification with force.

This completely changes the relationship between citizen and government. The citizen becomes a subject of government as opposed to the government acting with the consent of the citizen. Let us take a look at one easily understood example, the motorcycle helmet laws.

I doubt there is one case where the absence of a helmet made the rider more of a danger to their fellow citizens. So what is the justification for forcing a person to wear a helmet? Medicaid and Social Security. Should a person become disabled because they were not wearing a helmet they might become a lifelong liability on the social welfare system.

Thus the government has an interest in mitigating the injuries that can be sustained by someone operating a motorcycle. This is done at the expense of everyones freedom. Now all motorcyclists have lost the freedom to feel the wind in their hair in an effort to reduce the probability that some might become wards of the state.

The freedom from want or the redistribution of wealth, has been used for the past eighty years as rationalization to implement a plethora of unconstitutional, freedom squelching laws and programs. They use taxation and regulation to nudge people in a direction that is more advantageous to government and less conducive to individual freedom.

As usual the government acts like a bull in a china shop. Instead of holding the individual responsible they punish the entire community. It would be easy to pass a law that states if you are injured or disabled because you choose to ride a motorcycle, you relinquish all claims to government social welfare benefits. But no, that would connect voluntary actions to accepting responsibility for the outcome of those actions and the government works overtime to sever that connection.

We now have in Washington D.C. a group of a little over thirty Republican Representatives who are members of what is known as the Freedom Caucus. Now give that some thought for a moment. Only thirty or so members of the House of Representatives want to be affiliated with a group dedicated to getting government out of the way of our individual freedom. If you go back to the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, the entire Congress was the Freedom Caucus.

Today, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Lincoln would be considered alt-right radicals. Even Democrat John F. Kennedy with his ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country and his tax cutting policies would be considered by the liberals and media as completely out of the mainstream.

If freedom is to prevail, we must eliminate the incentive for government to infringe on our liberty. We must demand that the government return to its Constitutional limits. James Madison, father of the Constitution, stated; Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government. Ronald Reagan once said, Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didnt pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

The question we must ask ourselves, do we want to go down in history as the generation that allowed the flame of freedom to be extinguished or do we rise up and force our government to again respect its Constitutional boundaries?

Area resident Jack Loesch is a longtime teacher at the University of Akron. Read his website at http://www.TorchnFork.info. He may be reached at: TorchNFork@frontier.com

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Freedom I: The essence of America - SalemNews.net