I am for liberty. I am also for what works best to maintain it. Humans under government have already forfeited some liberty by definition. The questions for them are how much more liberty are they willing to trade for what price and how hard will they negotiate.
The fact that no one has a choice as to whether some government views him/her as its property is an obvious infringement on liberty. “Citizen” happiness indexes rise among nations whose governments exercise lesser amounts of interference in the choices made by their “citizens.”
The former German Democratic Republic (you can tell by the name that it was a peoples’ paradise) is an icon of the opposite persuasion, although no nation comes close to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. DPRK is so tight no one knows enough about life there to make a movie about it. There is a movie about life in East Germany, though, and it is a good one. It’s called “The Lives of Others.”
In the fascist nation with which I am most familiar, there is very, very little one can do without either directly paying for a government-issued license to do it or indirectly paying for a government-issued license to do it (sales or other “tax”). In fact I am hard-pressed to think of anything you can do legally that is not taxed or does not require a license. One can argue that most sex between “adults” is relatively free of government interference, I suppose, but another example?
Big corporations purchase most votes in Congress. Congress regularly passes laws that punish corporations for not playing the game right, thus eliminating competition from the ranks of those who make the payoffs. Is that not fascism?
Authoritarian governments, fascist and socialist alike, which is to say, all governments on Earth, seek to some degree to factionalize their subjects, to polarize them on various irrelevant issues, thus creating identifiable market segments to use in gauging how the next infringement on liberty will play.
Politics is this and only this: The continual argument over who gets to do what to whom, for how long, and against what degree of dissent.
4 comments:
Well said, Bob. All we can do is choose our dictators. Our government isn't the protector of rights that it was intended on being, it has instead become the arbiter of those rights. They pick and choose what they think we are responsible enough to handle on our own, and take those other rights that they think are too dangerous for us to possess.
Looks like someone in Utah took good notes from the Stasi, compiled "the list", and disseminate it. Too bad, so sad that many of the names were in error.
Looks like someone in Utah took notes, made "the list", and disseminated it. Too bad, so sad that the status on many names were wrong.
Looks like someone in Utah took good notes from the Stasi, compiled "the list", and disseminate it. Too bad, so sad that many of the names were in error.
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