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.

Telling people how to live

Quick comment: I just read elsewhere online where I commented yesterday that, "Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats seem anxious to admit that telling people how to live (slavery) doesn't become right even if it is 'legal.'" This is certainly a lesson I'd like to see those political parties learn. But many in the church need to learn this: "Telling people how to live (slavery) doesn't become right even if we're telling them to live the right way."

Of course I don't mean simply communicating persuasively to people about how they are to live. The Gospel is very persuasive, and powerful. But I'm talking about using the force of law. This is prohibited to us in the Bible. Let's call it what it is: slavery.

Conscription is slavery

There's a beautiful fable that goes around in Christian circles, about a little boy who was asked to donate blood in order to save his brother's life. The little boy readily agrees, and upon beginning to draw the blood, the doctors learn that the little boy was under the impression he was going to give all of his blood and die for his brother. The story is a touching analogy of the love the Lord Jesus had for us in giving His life, and His blood, for our sakes.

But let's turn the tables a bit. Suppose a person is diagnosed with a rare disease, and we discover that he can only be cured with a substance obtainable from a particular baby boy. But obtaining this substance will require dismantling the boy. The boy must be killed if the man wants to live. Christians would rightfully call this murder and label a man despicable who would kill a baby, even to save his own life. (Whether the baby is born or unborn, I might add.)

It is a beautiful thing for a man to willingly give his life to save others. In fact, Jesus said no man has greater love than this (John 15:13). But it is abominable to require such a sacrifice from another without his consent.

No man has the right to the life of another. The enslavers of former centuries captured human beings and sold them as property. The truth of the matter is that we all belong to God, and since God decreed, "Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls" (Romans 14:4), then we are accountable to God, not to each other. Thus a legal system that is moral recognizes the self ownership of each individual, giving them the right to acknowledge their ownership by God or else live to themselves, with God, not the state, as Judge.

To exercise authority over other people is to assert that they are not owned by themselves, or by God, but by the one exercising authority. As Jesus said, such people like to call themselves "Benefactors," pretending that what they are doing is good for all concerned (Luke 22:25), but it is not to be so among us (22:26).

In America today every soldier serving in the military is doing so by his own consent. In fact, it makes me angry when people try to pretend that the stopgap measures that extend the tour of duty of some soldiers is somehow a "backdoor draft," because those soldiers agreed to those stopgap measures, and opposing these agreements means opposing the freedom of people to make agreements, the freedom of contract. (Not to mention that it unfairly accuses the authorities of doing something wrong, when all they are doing is relying on agreements that free people made to them. The authorities exercise immoral compulsion often, but this is not one of those instances.)

But it was not always so. Beginning in the time of Abraham Lincoln, the government asserted the authority to compel its citizens to fight for its defense. In short, the government asserted ownership rights over its people. It declared itself to be the master and the people to be slaves. It stole them from their rightful Owner.

If we agree that people have the right to self-defense, then we agree that they have the right to fight for themselves, their families, and their homes. We would also agree that they have the right to delegate this authority: to request help (volunteer or paid) in their own defense, to band together for common defense, to voluntarily appoint police or other authorities for the defense of their rights. But when do people have the right to compel others to fight for their defense? When do they have the right to compel others to furnish their resources and children for their defense? And if you say, "They have this right because they must do so in order to survive," then you are saying that the ends justify the means, and you need to explain to me why the terminally ill man can't kill a baby in order to survive. Because you are postulating a situation where a man is going to die and has the right to save his life by sending another grown man to a potential death.

If the threat is real enough, won't people band together for defense willingly? Many military and former military members I have known will tell you this is one of the reasons a volunteer army situation is far preferable to a draft: the volunteers believe in the cause being fought for. It worked for the Revolutionary War.

When you get to the point that the government is compelling people to fight in defense, you have reached the point where the government is less worried about preserving the lives and rights of its citizens and more worried about preserving its own survival. Institutions will fight like crazy in order to continue to exist, and to expand their own power.

The draft has been ended, and will hopefully never come back, but the government still requires registration of young men in order to continue asserting this right.

Do you have the right to the lives of others? Or are they owned by God? If they are owned by God, I hope you would never assert ownership rights over them.

Compulsory education is slavery

Texas state Representative Wayne Smith wants to make it illegal for parents to miss parent teacher conferences, in order to encourage more parental responsibility.

As homeschooling parents, we're not worried about missing any parent teacher conferences. (Though according to the old joke, if you talk to yourself you only have to worry about yourself answering back...)

In a free society, free citizens can never be told what to do, where to go, when to be there, etc. The only exception to this is when a free citizen steps outside the law, by violating another person's right, and thus loses his freedom to the extent to which he took it away from someone else. (In older times, the term "outlaw" meant someone who had literally been deemed outside the protection of the law because he had chosen not to abide by the law.)

If we're telling grown parents where to go and when to be there, aren't we taking away their freedom? Of course we are!

But we crossed that line long ago. We tell the children where to go, right? We force the parents to make their children go to school. We've been violating the liberties of parents and children through compulsory schooling for almost one hundred fifty years.

The founders of the United States knew that the free market (the organic institution you get when you respect God-given liberties) furnished the best possible education. Until about 1850, every one of them was privately schooled, either through a private institution or at home. Literacy was near universal, and love of liberty reigned. Then some people who wanted to take away liberty decided it would be a good idea to have a centralized, universal education system so that all children could be educated in the same values. The result is over a century of indoctrination, and a society that is less educated and less interested in liberty. In fact, amazingly, lots of people see forcing children to go to school as being essential for liberty. The founders would've disagreed.

A book you might like to read on this subject is John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education. You can buy the book, or read it for free online at the link provided. I promise it will open your eyes.

You might also like to know that Thomas Jefferson explicitly declared it to be wrong and inconceivable to violate the liberty of parents and children through compulsory schooling:

"It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father." (Note to Elementary School Act, 1817.)

Of course, in a free society, uninterfered with by criminal force (whether exercised by the state or others), people have natural incentives to see that their children receive the education they find to be most fitting. But the state has eliminated an enormous number of incentives for this. Chalk up Representative Smith's idea as yet another misguided attempt by the state to correct a problem caused by itself. The solution is less government, not more, Mr. Smith. Government IS the problem.

In earlier posts, I've proved that taxation is simply another name for stealing. Compulsory funding of education means robbing people to educate children. What kind of lessons does this teach? What kind of lessons does it teach when the children themselves and their parents and all of their neighbors have their liberty violated for the sake of this education? As an answer, think how many people (maybe even you, dear reader) will react negatively to this essay, asserting that the state (or society) does in fact have a claim to the lives of its citizens -- perhaps we should say its "subjects" -- and the right to violate their liberty in these ways. Yes, compulsory education teaches its lessons well.

Has God entrusted you with the authority to command other people what to do? I don't think so. Don't support the government doing so in your name.