Dakota Beacon

Can actions be illegal if performed by one party but legal if preformed by another? Yes. Government routinely executes certain actions which draw no attention from law enforcement, but those same actions executed by an individual draw the full wrath of that very same government.

At the Freeman Online, economist Sheldon Richman has some meaty thoughts on the matter.

If you or I kill when our lives are not in mortal danger, it is called murder. When the State does it, it is called war, or counterinsurgency, or capital punishment. If you or I, threatening force, demand money from our neighbors for their protection or to do good works, it is called robbery. When the State does it, it’s called taxation. If you or I impress someone into service against his or her will, it’s called slavery. If the State does it, it’s called conscription or national service. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Richman explains the differences with a simple concept: freedom.

In this life, what entity truly controls our freedom? Sure, our Declaration of Independence declares one of our God-given rights to be "liberty," but on Earth, today, who really controls our ability to exercise that right?

Government.

The state is free to do what it pleases, and gets away with whatever it does. Yet individuals are held accountable to laws--in fact, laws made by the same government that has no respect for those very laws. Over the last century in particular, laws have come to limit individual freedom, not the freedom of government. The trend ignores the way that our Founders intended America to run. The Constitution--a document of negative powers of government--prohibits government from engaging in certain behaviors and sets the individual mostly free. But the Constitution has been corrupted by progressivism since 1900.

Any objective study of human history reveals that individual freedom has been the exception, not the rule. Only since 1776 have there been serious leanings toward freedom on this planet, and only in a few choice places. The relatively free life that we Americans live is a rare experience, even today.

We now have a chance to set America back on the Founders' course. The 2010 Midterm Election results signaled a clear rejection of the freedom-reducing, prosperity-killing agenda that Obama and the Democrat Congressional majority implemented over the last two years. Will the GOP--and 2012 reelection-inspired Democrat senators--begin to peel back the huge nanny state that progressives have created? Or will we Americans take our place alongside other peoples throughout history who succumbed to elitists that control the state?

More and more, we have become a nation with government of the people, by the ruling class, for the corporate donors. We must arrest the trend. Yet I will believe that the arrest has occurred only when I see the handcuffs on the progressive agenda.

Presently, I do not think that the GOP has the guts to whip out a single pair of cuffs. I want to be wrong.

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© 2010 Chuck Rogér