Constitutional Libertarianism

Constitutional Libertarianism

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

What are they "supposed" to do?

What is the primary obligation of the Federal government?  First and foremost, to protect the nation from threats, foreign and domestic.  To make sure that the infrastructure is in place and monitored.  To ensure that the citizens are informed.

Let's talk about that last bit, "informed".  Does informed mean educated?  Many think so and may be correct as long as educated means fact based, non-rhetorical or biased information being taught.  On the other hand, many other people think it is a parents responsibility to see to their children's education and the federal government needs to step back to a role of making sure resources are available for parents to choose from to provide said education.

Informed also means that it is the governments task to make sure that people are doing honest business with each other so that citizens can make informed decisions.  Now, even if any given individual citizen makes a poor decision, it is their decision for them to make.  If they had the information up front and came to  poor decision anyway, it's their own fault and consequence.  Not anyone else's.

Instead, the federal government has been slowly removing liberty by falsifying information or not providing information from the start.  They hide information and they conspire with corporations who line their pockets to conceal product information as well.

Making sure people are properly and openly informed is one of the greatest tasks the federal government has yet it is one of the most abused.

Making sure people have access to important information and resources is a great enough task.  Trying to force people to use it or to intentionally not provide it is simply abuse of power.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Liberty is a Responsibility

A Libertarian Party is an oxymoron.  It is it's own worst enemy.  To truly have liberty, one must be free of controlling influence of other people and/groups.  For the Libertarian Party to have a platform and send representatives to vote on laws is action that goes against the idealism of Liberty.

No, Liberty is an individual ideal that should be shared by as many people as possible as they live their lives in this world.  For for a country to truly be a land of Liberty, it requires the people who would have that Liberty to be responsible for their actions.

Without that individual responsibility to make sure that everyone is cleaning up after their own messes created by the choices they make, the good and the bad, there is a void created in which those messes have to be cleaned up and monitored from that point on so that others are not "harmed" by the irresponsible people's messes.  That entity to clean the irresponsible people's messes is the government.

What do we have now?  A government that operates based on the idea they have to protect people from themselves.  Why?  Because there are too many irresponsible people here who have become conditioned to the idea that someone else will take care of them and clean up their messes and keep them safe.

The government has taken the wrong route though.  Instead of making things more difficult for irresponsible people, they take the "easy" way and try to control all the people, the irresponsible and the responsible alike.

Here's the path the government has taken.  If you see a kid spill a bunch of trash on the floor, and there are a bunch of kids in the saeme room, you should make the kid who made the mess go clean it up so that the others can go about their way.

What our government has chosen to do is tell all the kids in the room to get out of the area, including the mess-maker, has someone else clean the mess up, then tells the kids that none of them can be in that room again unless they have no trash to leave around.

The responsible kids are now being punished, the irresponsible kid never had to clean up his own mess and the government now has assumed more authority to "protect" the kids from messes in the future.

If you want to have Liberty, you have to be ready to clean up your own mess.  If you want to have few laws, you have to be ready to police yourself and make sure that you as an individual are looking up at the rules on the wall and sticking to them.

You cannot have Liberty and be irresponsible at the same time.  If you don't clean up your own mess, someone else will, and they take your liberty from you from that point on.