The Frozen Future

Freedom and compulsion are mutually exclusive social resources 

The Power of One

By Dr Zero

The Liberty movement is a rising tide of resistance to the all-consuming State.  It has captured the attention of independent voters made nervous by the fabulously expensive failure of Obama-style socialism.  But what can it say to those who already depend on the State for their provenance, including a growing payroll of government employees, and those who depend on welfare entitlements?

I would invite those dependents to think about the future.

Freedom and compulsion are mutually exclusive social resources.  Greater compulsion comes at the expense of freedom, and vice versa.  Every society employs a mixture of these resources.  Even the most classically liberal nation would still have laws, which the government must enforce.  The use of compulsion to prevent murder is not tyranny.

The America of 2012 has long passed the point where freedom and compulsion were evenly mixed.  Freedom has dwindled steadily for generations.  Over the last few years, we have witnessed a mad rush to infuse our society with powerful doses of compulsion.  Vast sums of money have been spent – billions wasted, while billions more vanished into thin air.  A skeptical public is told it lacks the intelligence to properly analyze the results.  Hideously complex and ambiguous bills full of unexpected consequences have been passed, creating a labyrinth of mist and lightning that reasonable businessmen fear to enter.  A Congress that could not even produce a budget demands more money.  A government that hides its agenda within layers of fused and blended legislation demands more obedience.

This process will accelerate, if it is not quickly reversed.  Today’s compulsion lays the groundwork for tomorrow’s oppression.  That is the true significance of our titanic deficits.  Deficit spending is an obligation placed on the future, destroying the freedom of a generation which cannot speak for itself yet.  If a just government draws its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, then Obama’s insane deficits destroy the very legitimacy of our State.  The children who will grow up to pay for his programs have not been asked for their consent.  They will be born into a world where freedom has been almost entirely replaced by requirement.  They’ll be forced to work within a network of subsidies and punitive taxes they never agreed to.  A massive, crumbling edifice of entitlements will be dropped on their shoulders, and they will be told they have no choice but to pay for it.  Opportunity will be replaced by compliance.

In the squalid “people’s republics” of the Third World, democracy means one man, one vote, one time.  In America, today’s elections become a true expression of liberty because we know the next round of elections is right behind them, and another round behind that… but if we don’t rise up and make history in this crucial November, what will the next generation be allowed to vote on?

For example, if this election does not produce a historic shift in power, and begin the process of repealing ObamaCare, the voters of the future will be told they can never make their own health care decisions again.  The sales pitch about “keeping your own plan if you like it” has already been exposed as a despicable lie.  The whole rotten law is a mass of lies and delusions… but the ruling class assures us it is permanent. We might be permitted to make an adjustment or two, but as the Democrats like to say about so many of the jobs they’ve destroyed, the free-market health insurance industry is never coming back.

The Obama agenda is meant to be a permanent change in the relationship of the middle class to the State.  As with every artifact of socialism since the New Deal, every one of its miserable “achievements” is promptly declared irrevocable.  We can never “go backward,” no matter how obviously inferior the new way is.  Increasing amounts of compulsion will be poured around those progressive achievements like cement, to hold them in place.  If the Democrats are left in power to “fix” ObamaCare, you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll do it by making more things illegal.

Freedom is motion. It changes and adapts.  Free men find solutions their fathers never dreamed of.  The people who babble about a “living Constitution” complain about the vitality of a nation that refuses to submit to their plans.  Strange they don’t understand how the people must be free to adapt to changing circumstances, greeting new challenges with unfettered imagination. The Constitution must be static, so the people can be dynamic.  There is rich irony in listening to those who demand the right to design our future, for decades to come, sneer about the limited vision of the dead white males who placed chains upon the State.

When freedom is replaced by compulsion, the wonderful random motion of a free society is brought to an end.  Water becomes stagnant when it doesn’t flow.  It hardens into ice when its molecules stop moving.  If you are inclined to support the leviathan State because it takes care of your needs, think about the frozen future you will leave behind for your children.  The machine that sustains you will collapse upon them.  Believe in yourself, and the free people around you.  Take a chance on yourself, so the next generation will have meaningful choices to make.

Look around, and bear witness to the failure of compulsion.  Dooming the future to live beneath even more of it would be cowardly.  Freedom is a far more valuable resource.  It must be tended carefully.