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In the End, It's Up to Us Philip V. Brennan It's midday Tuesday and I have no idea how the election will turn out so I'll avoid writing about what the end result might be.
Instead let's talk about the real issue in this and any other election which I'll compress into two words: "personal responsibility."
During my long lifetime, I have seen the development of a mass psychosis that causes many Americans to believe that the advancement of their lives and fortunes is legitimately the business of government and not their own. How many times have you heard someone say "there ought to be a law," as one way of expressing the corrupt notion that whatever the problem might be, government at some level has the responsibility for handling it to whatever extent it deems necessary and appropriate.
Hitler and Stalin showed us just how far government can go in doing what it deems to be necessary and appropriate to achieve its aims.
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Taken to its logical conclusion the idea leads not to utopia, but instead to a Dachau, an Auschwitz, and a Soviet gulag. When the people empower government to solve all of their problems, government inevitably responds with force to the public demand, and as George Washington is said to have explained, "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
Whether or not Washington actually said it, it's simply an exercise in liberal sophistry to deny its truth; all recorded history has proven it to be an accurate description — government cannot exist without the power to enforce it's fiats and edicts and that power cannot be described as anything less than force — and sometimes brute force.
Of course much of what government in a republic such as ours seeks to do is both desirable and fully justified by the circumstances, but the possibility for overreaching is always present. This is especially true when we surrender to the government the power to do for us what we should be doing for ourselves.
If we refuse to curb our most basic instincts, government is only too happy to step in and use its force to curb them for us. The problem begins when government decides which of our basic instincts require curbing.
Such basic instincts as what the government sees as a delusion — that the money we earn belongs to us, and not to our greedy masters in Washington. That delusion must me suppressed and if force is needed so be it. Bring in the IRS.
In Mayor Bloomberg's New York City super-nanny administration, for example, having an ashtray in your place of business is a violation of the law that prohibits smoking just about anywhere within the city's borders. There are actually special goon squads empowered to come into one's private place of business and carry out the government's diligent search for such lethal weapons as ash trays. And if the nannies have their way, restaurants will soon be forbidden to serve foods made with certain kinds of fats and shortenings.
This is all for the alleged good of the people of New York City, of course, but it usurps the right of New Yorkers to decide such very basic human rights as what kind of cooking fats they want used to prepare their food, or to smoke in private establishments.
If we want to endanger our health, we have every right to do it. And all the propaganda used to justify such regulations from the self-appointed nannies in the liberal establishment which insists that your smoking or your eating fat-laden fried chicken endangers the people around us is just that: propaganda thought up to justify the use of government force to enforce their delusions.
Now that's small stuff compared to the use of force to suppress free speech as has been done in the campaign finance laws now on the books, or the absolute terror tactics employed by the government in the enforcement of its tax laws. Get in the government's way in these and other governmental activities and you'll find out what it feels like to be run over by an Abrams tank.
How you donate your money to political causes, short of outright bribery, is your absolute right — yet we have allowed government to dictate the terms of campaign contributions that seriously diminishes our right to free speech.
Should we not be sufficiently alert to detect improper political contributions and the effect they have on government actions? Isn't that a job for the media, that is when they are not busy promoting Democrats and leftist political causes?
None of these dangers to individual liberty would exist if we would exercise our own responsibilities to take care of ourselves. Instead of making every effort to provide for our retirement years by putting aside some of our income, we rely on the government to step in.
And when it becomes crystal clear that the financial stability of the Social Security and Medicare systems is seriously threatened, we turn our backs on seeking solutions that would involve allowing those still working to control and invest a small part of their FICA taxes, thereby building an estate for themselves in addition to their Social Security benefits.
Obviously we accept the idea that people must not be allowed to think and act for themselves when it comes to planning for their retirement years.
We turn that responsibility over to government and go on happy go-lucky as we approach the precipice over which the whole structure is about to plunge.
For all intents and purposes, we have allowed the government to spend our money recklessly, much of it shamefully wasted on programs designed to do for us what we should do for ourselves and done in ways as government does most often: incompetently and horribly expensive.
Competence and thrift being alien concepts to bureaucracies that exist solely to perpetuate their existence at our expense.
Maybe it's too late.
Perhaps we have allowed ourselves to be the permanent wards of nanny government, sonomulently acceptant of the whims and caprices of our bureaucratic masters on the shores of the Potomac River.
If so it won't matter a good doodly damn how this or any other election turns out. Alea iacta est! (The die is cast.)
****** Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association For Intelligence Officers.
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