The Great Awakening

What America needs is another Great Awakening. Though, this time we all need to convert to the one true religion: Freedom.

Compared to other religions, freedom is much easier to understand.

It has a single creed: All individuals have an inalienable right to life, liberty and property.

It has only one commandment: Thou shalt not coerce your fellow man.

Almost all the problems we face stem from our breaking the one great commandment and trying to get our way in this world through force or fraud.

Whether we are trying to coerce others into worshipping our god, or joining our commune, or buying our product, or being part of our welfare state, it all boils down to the desire to compel others to do what we want.

If we could all just agree to not coerce each other, what a wonderful world it would be.

Here is a thought question for us on our path to enlightenment: What is the common denominator in the big problems we face in government mandated education, government mandated retirement, and government mandated health care?

It’s as if we learned nothing from the Old World’s experiment in government mandated religion in days gone by. Religion was never the problem. It was the government mandate part that was causing all the blood shed. The same is true today with all our areas of conflict.

We need to be figuring out how to create free market education, free market retirement and free marked health care. That is the only thing that will allow us to solve these problems. When we start trying to achieve universal health care the same way we have achieved universal cell phone coverage, we will be on the right track.

Remember, free market means free from coercion, not free from regulation or responsibility. Rules are needed, but those rules must be based on the idea of removing coercion, not on granting some politically favored groups a monopoly on its use.

While coercive governments are far more destructive, we must always remember that individuals and businesses are just as likely to want to use coercion as are governments. All must be constantly watched on our path to true religion.

The why of violence

Over at the Huffington post, they are discussing the why’s of violence. Why did the brothers set off that bomb in Boston is the question of the day?

Here are my thoughts on the matter.

‘Why’ is a very big question and goes to the heart of human nature, especially male nature. The violence instinct was either built into us by God or evolved into us by nature and serves as an essential survival trait. When the hungry lion, brutal tyrant, or street thug attacks, a man must fight back violently to stay alive.

People ultimately use violence for one of two reasons: to impose their will on others (tyranny), or to stop others from imposing their will on them (freedom).

This is the nature of the thing.

The other component is the ideology of the thing, i.e. the beliefs of an individual or culture regarding violence.

If a culture believes it is okay to impose its will on others, then it will be a very violent society as it continually heads out to conquer.

If a culture has adopted a victim mentality and believes everybody is out to get it, then it will be a violent society as well as it lashes out in what it perceives to be self-defense.

If a culture is genuinely being attacked by a tyrant culture, then it will of necessity be violent.

If a society respects life and individual rights, and teaches people to turn the other cheek, and to live and let live, then it will be far less violent relatively speaking.

The violence instinct will never (and should never) be done away with because it is ultimately essential for survival. It can only be channeled based on the beliefs we adopt in our societies.

In the case of the Tsarnaev brothers, we can make some pretty good guesses as to why they did it. The brothers adopted the ideology of Islam. Specifically that of radical Islam.

On the one hand, members of the tribe of radical Islam believe that Allah justifies them in imposing their beliefs on others. All must worship Allah, and if they won’t do it willingly (the preferred method), then they must be compelled to do so (the necessary method).

On the other hand, they genuinely believe that their culture has been horribly victimized by the Western world over the last fifteen hundred years (a good topic for another time).

The combination of those two beliefs is what is creating the double barrel blast of violence that we are seeing through the Middle East and across the world right now. They simultaneously believe that they are fighting for their God and fighting for their freedom.

All men (especially the young ones) have the violence instinct. It’s just that right now the Islamic ones are not having theirs channeled productively.

Gun control

There is a lot of online debate going on about the gun control vote in the Senate last week. People on the other side of the political spectrum from myself are ranting that it was a great moral failure. Here is my two-bit rant that I posted in reply:

The failure to pass gun control in the senate was not a moral failure, it was a failure to win the argument. The right to life and the defense of life are inalienable. Guns are the best tools ever invented for self-defense and as such, freedom lovers will not give them up easily.

Democrats failed to make the argument for why the changes were needed. If they had only brought forward the background check proposal, they could have won the day. By trying to include the assault weapon and magazine capacity bans, they exposed themselves as both power grabbers and clueless about weapons. This destroyed any chance of having a sane discussion on the background checks or of getting any bipartisan support.

As for the argument that they are just concerned about saving children’s lives, we will believe that when they stop killing tens of thousands of their unborn children and stop turning a blind eye to the butcher houses such as Dr. Gosnell’s.

We freedom lovers value both life and the defense of life and aren’t convinced we should compromise with those who seem to value neither.

Thoughts on immigration reform.

The federal government is responsible for controlling our borders and determining who is allowed to enter the country and under what conditions.

The foundation of free and peaceful societies is the rule of law. We make fair and just laws through the political process and require people to live by them.

Even when the laws are not ideal, we must continue to obey them while we go through the process of changing them. This is how the game is and must be played in a free nation. The only alternative to the rule of law is the rule of whim, and whims are not good things on which to build a society.

Those who come here illegally must face a consequence for breaking the law. The border must be defended and the immigration system overhauled so people can more easily get here legally.

A congress who fails to fix our broken immigration system is not doing its job.

A president who fails to enforce the existing laws is not doing his job.

A citizenry who keeps electing congressmen and presidents who fail to do their job is not doing their job.

Shame on all of us.

Lest I be accused of pointing fingers of blame without offering solutions here is the three point RTN plan (not orignal by any means).

1. Secure the border. Stop the leak before trying to pump out the water.

2. Reform the current immigration system to make it faster and simpler to get here. The best way is to use a ‘rent with an option to buy option’. Make plenty of work visas available for people to come here, get jobs and start businesses. After a set amount of time, if they are good productive citizens, then naturalize them.

3. Make work visas available to the illegals already here for a limited time (say a year) and start the clock as in step two.

4. After the fixed signup time, start deporting any illegals without visas.

These steps help us meet our obligation establish fair laws and live by them. It also satisfies our desire to be humane and fair and make it possible for many people to come to America.

Of course there is still the need to reform our coercive welfare system before it bankrupts us and solves our immigration problem for us (after the collapse, we will all be wanting to immigrate out instead of in)

Quotes of the day 4/2/2013 – the two topias

“Utopia is an idyllic society of peace and prosperity where everybody is free to do exactly what I tell them to do.”

“Freetopia is an idyllic society of peace and prosperity where everybody is free to pursue their own happiness, so long as that happiness does not involve coercing others.”

People have been pursing Utopia since the beginning of recorded history. Some charismatic leader comes along and thinks, ‘you know this world would be such a better place if everybody just did whatever I think they should do.’

Surprisingly there always seems to be plenty of people willing to help try and create it with him. Some do so out of idealism. Others do it because the leader promises them they will get to be on the telling side of things as opposed to the told side.

The chief characteristic of all of these societies has been the belief that they could achieve utopia through coercion. Peace and prosperity at the point of a gun, with the guns being used to enforce the one sanctioned ideology of the leader.

Freetopia on the other hand has never really been fully tried. The closest thing to a declared attempt came in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. Freetopia is based on the idea of everybody being free to live life as they see fit, so long as they don’t see fit to force other people to fit with them (if that makes sense).

In Freetopia, the guns are used as a means of eliminating coercion, not as the means of imposing coercion.

This is the subtle difference between U and Free topia.

In Utopia, the gun is held to your head to force you to turn your property over to the collective. In Freetopia, the gun is held at the head of the guy who is trying to take your property for the collective to get him to stop.

In Utopia, the gun is held at your head to make sure you vote for the dear leader. In Freetopia, the gun is held at the head of the guy trying to force you to vote for dear leader to get him to stop.

As I said, it is a subtle difference that is easily confused. There have been many Utopian movements over the ages that firmly believed they were pursuing Freetopia, modern Liberalism being one of the best examples in our day (but by no means the only one).

Gay marriage

Some observations:
First, I love the free speech aspect of this whole debate and the fact that the Internet lets everybody put their opinion out there (even with the fact that so much of it is mean and vile on both sides).

Second, at this point, we aren’t fighting about rights nearly as much as we are fighting over ideology and who will get to impose theirs on everybody else. Of course, we all differ on who we think is being the coercive ideologue and who is being reasonable.

It will be interesting to see how this thing plays out.

In one camp, we have God who has declared that only a man and a woman can create new life and that they had better make a life long commitment (i.e. get married) to care and nurture that life before they do the birds and the bees thing.

In another camp, we have nature that has decided essentially the same thing through a million years of evolution (stable families create more stable children and so long term are favored by natural selection. Marriage is the contract that has evolved to acknowledge that reality).

In the final camp, we have fifty years of liberalism that has decided men and women are completely interchangeable and so marriage is a sexist, discriminatory institution, and therefore the power of the state must be used to forcibly change it.

In the short term, I think liberalism is going to carry the day. Long term, my money is on God and nature.

Quote of the day 3/20/2013

“The best way to get people to respect the law is to make the laws respectable.”
~Frederick Bastiat

In a free society, the governed and the governing make an agreement with each other.

The governing agree to create fair and just laws (i.e. respectable) and to enforce them equally with everybody. No exceptions. No exemptions. No bias. No favored races, sexes, or income groups.

The governed, in return, agree to faithfully obey those laws (i.e. to respect them).

This is known as the rule of law in traditional liberalism (that would be the old kind of liberalism that believed in life, liberty, property and freedom from coercion, not the new kind that believes in all that other coercive welfare stuff).

With human nature being what it is, respect and respectable don’t occur very frequently in the never ending friction between the governed and the governing.

I’m not sure why this is, since every time they do come together, they create the twin children of peace and prosperity.

I suppose its because while in theory we all believe in equality, in practice we are like the animals in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. “All animals are equal. but some animals are more equal than others”.