Clinging to freedom means you support SLAVERY!

Reid Compares Opponents of Health Care Reform to Supporters of Slavery

Wait - if you don't believe in forcing some of your neighbors to work to pay for substandard health insurance for some of your other neighbors, that makes you a supporter of slavery? You mean opposing involuntary servitude makes one a supporter of slavery?

I think I must be behind on my Newspeak.

I'll submit to whatever hair-brained scheme the rest of you come up with. I promise. I just really would life for people not to enslave my neighbors in my name. I'll submit; just please don't make me guilty of doing it to my neighbors and children.

And also, as long as I have the legal right to say what's on my mind, I'll keeping pointing out that economists like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard proved decades ago that collectivist schemes like this will always be suboptimal, in books like "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," and "Power and Market." The emperor really does have no clothes. Again, if you want to put these yokes and shackles on me, all right: here are my hands and neck, and I'll stoop down. But my neighbors and children are innocent. Please don't claim to represent me while making them suffer.

Totalitarians looking for another name

Leftist politicians are abandoning the word "liberal" in favor of the word "progressive." Of course, they pretend they are fighting to restore the original definition of "liberal," which meant being in favor of freedom, which they definitely are not. But as we know, it's politically expedient to claim that things which are not freedom and liberty actually are freedom and liberty. Like democracy, for example.

I know a bunch of libertarians who would love to have the word back. That's what it used to mean. Of course, it's truly bizarre to see advocates of religious faith in government like Hillary Clinton pretend to care that liberal doesn't mean liberty anymore.

I'm fine with them labelling themselves progressives. I just hope there will always be an extremely large number of people like me around to point out that the "progress" that they want is totalitarian. What this world does NOT need is just the "right" leaders in charge so that we can finally make "progress." True progress would be liberty.

A couple of years ago my local city politics had a group calling itself "Moving [our city] Forward." I opposed it, of course. What utter dreck! You'll never hear a politician who doesn't say things along the lines of "a vote for me is a vote for moving forward; I just think we need to move forward," etc.

Free human beings don't define "moving forward" like a collective, like a communist nation, like the Borg. The only meaningful definition of "progress" at the government level is the progressive elimination of government itself. Want to make progress today? Call one of your agents in government and tell them to stop doing anything, and especially to stop taking money from your neighbors and telling them what they can and cannot do. And convince your neighbors to do the same. Help build a world where we don't gladly hand out the reigns of tyranny to people who promise to make the most "progress." That would be a world where anyone who stands up and says "put me in charge, I'll help us make progress" doesn't get a single vote.

"We" -- agents for the collective

I loved this quote:

"Society remains primitive insofar as individuals are regarded as agents [for] the collective. Society progresses only as the depraved romance of the collective gives way to respect for the individual - the individual whose life and property are never regarded as being at the disposal of the state."

I couldn't agree more. The original context was about the possibility of a military draft, but this is the truth for every issue. "We" need to quit talking about what "we" need to do. "We" especially need to stop talking about what "we" need to do for "our" children. My children are not your children, and your children are not mine. For you Christians out there, where does your Bible authorize you to make decisions about the raising of other people's children? Where does your Bible command you to participate in and advocate some big collective of society with one common purse making decisions for the "common good"? The only thing I can find on the subject is Proverbs 1:10-19, and I think that sums up the matter quite well.