Archive for the ‘america’ Category
Understanding Liberty
This will be the first in a series of posts designed to explain liberty in a common sense, less theoretical way. I sincerely hope it helps a few people understand a little better.
Look out onto a crowd of people….what do you see? Do you see skin colors? Genders? Gender preference? Hair colors? I would hope not. Real liberty, a real liberty minded individual, sees diversity not in classifying a crowd by it’s gender, ethnicity, or other superficial categories, but rather sees diversity in talents, dreams, desires, goals, hopes, dreams and creativity. Liberty says that each one of these folks deserves the freedom to cultivate their dreams, talents and creative aspirations. When we pigeon hole people based on some superficial attempt at categorization (often under the guise of compassion or altruism) we start to strip these people of their ultimate freedom to choose whatever life they want.
A good end timely example is healthcare. With liberty we have the freedom to choose a lifestyle, and that choice might not always be a good one. We may choose a healthy lifestyle or an unhealthy one. If we choose an unhealthy lifestyle, we take risk and this is the risk inherent in liberty. When we remove the risk, with government saying we must cover everyone with healthcare regardless of their choices, it starts to eliminate or reduce the inherent risk of our choices. This also reduces liberty and freedom. The risk says that if we engage in poor health habits and choices, we run the risk of not being covered by insurance, or early death. This is a risk we knowingly accept. If we choose a healthy lifestyle, we’re rewarded with lower medical costs and lower insurance premium rates. But rather, the government want’s to subsidize risk. It want’s to minimize the impact of choices we make in life, regardless of whether they are good ones or not. And this divesting of risk will be carried by those that make good choices.
It is not too much of a stretch to apply this to other things. We see it already with the villification of “rich people”. To make money, to be successful in acheving your dreams and goals and doing a damn good job of it, is looked at as “unfair”. These people will be increasingly punished with higher taxes just for starters. Just yesterday President Obama was, during one of his speeches, saying how evil profit is.
Joe might take his life savings and invest it into creating the business of his dreams. He may end up with one of three results. He may be very successful, making much more money and/or creating greater happiness for himself, his family, and his future employees. He may end up with around the same lifestyle as before. He may also fail, loosing a good portion of his life savings. If we, as a society, eliminate risk by bailing out failure (as with housing, banks, and healthcare) we necessarily reduce the chance of success. The consequences can be several: people may take more risk with less understanding, knowing that the safety net will not let them fail (housing bubble). The cost of bailing out improperly understood risk costs a lot to the people that are using common sense, which is not fair. It becomes a case of not subsidizing good risk, rather increasing reckless risk.
Putting this burden on the people who have done well, becomes a punishment for those who followed rational, well thought out plans, and rewards doing things wrong. This puts a burden on common sense. This in turn takes money away from those who can invest into more risk into a well thought out plan, subsidizing the failures. This is how the success that comes from risk is reduced.
Risk is a necessary part of liberty and freedom. We are free to take the risk needed to get further in life, to achieve greater happiness. There is also the possibility of failure. Common sense and good planning reduces this risk but never eliminates it. Reducing risk with common sense is one thing, but subsidizing it through the government under the guise of compassion is destructive to the American dream.
When we take away the possibility of failure we take away the possibility of success.
