Freedom is Hard Work (ObamaCare makes it harder)

Grant Ellis at American Thinker questions whether Americans are up to the task ahead.

For better or worse, the ugly truth is that money is at the center of liberty. To resist the seduction of free money, you must have money you can call you own: money that is under your exclusive control. Money you earn by taking full advantage of the opportunities this nation offers to everyone: opportunities to prosper. Liberty only exists where opportunities to prosper exist but individuals must do the hard work required to prosper. THAT is why freedom remains hard. It's also why those that have already prospered tend to defend their hard earned money against governmental confiscation. In essence, they are protecting their very freedom.

The Founders were endlessly concerned about giving ordinary Americans an unprecedented measure of liberty as offered by the Constitution they were drafting. They wondered if regular folk could muster the sophistication necessary to make rational, intelligent decisions at the polls and they wondered if citizens would be able to self-regulate their activities in the absence of rigorous governmental oversight. As we now know, when finally offered nearly unbridled liberty Americans of the day did not disappoint.

Fast forward to 2009 and it's easy to see why the Founders were so worried. In spite of various streams of round-the-clock news and data, most of our electorate is misinformed, blissfully ignorant or simply apathetic with respect to the means by which they are governed. Meanwhile, the civil, moral and ethical margins of our society are ever more deformed by a widening cultural belief that liberty means "anything goes". Where the "anything goes" belief intersects the notion that "the state should meet individual needs", we have real trouble. That's where we are now.

The great irony of America is that the maintenance of freedom is awfully hard work and with few exceptions, it's the work of individuals, not the government. The Constitution was drafted to ensure that this was the case. It was drafted to make government subject to the governed. Of course that means that the governed must do the hard civic work of keeping government in check. That work is made all the harder by those who are determined, in their vast ignorance, to have government impose equality-of-outcome across the social landscape. In short, those that argue for wealth redistribution lead us toward tyranny. Problem is, these ignorant few are often successful in co opting government, particularly when the hard civic work of containing government goes unattended as it has now for decades. As lovers of liberty we have been our own worst enemy.

Liberty and responsibility are codependent: two sides of the same coin. I don't think this concept is that difficult to grasp but our government, often at the insistence of a loud and ignorant political base, has sought for decades to make Americans less responsible for their daily lives and therefore less free. Curiously, this stealthy march toward tyranny is often done in the name of compassion, usually for "the needy". Shamefully, with the "help" of government, the truly needy are at high risk of becoming truly dependent. Once that happens, escape is practically impossible. As evidence, I refer you to the war on poverty which has yet to secure a single beachhead but holds an untold number of dependent prisoners within inner cities throughout America. For further proof of our national shame, look no further than the "Obama Bucks" stimulus debacle that occurred in Detroit last week.

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