Association of Free Citizens

Below is an essay I wrote with the hope/expectation that it would get published in Dead Tree Media somewhere.  Who knows if it will or not, but I can see no reason why the world should wait for DTM to act or be deprived altogether if it doesn’t.

Taxes erode freedom.  One of the ways in which taxes erode freedom is rooted in the nature of bureaucracies, especially government bureaucracies.  This is because the only source of income for government bureaucracies is tax revenue.  Bureaucracies are necessary in any society, without them no large scale institution could function.

However, all bureaucracies suffer from certain defects simply because these are intrinsic to human nature.  Among these defects is mission creep, the tendency of an organization to expand its area of influence.  We know this intuitively: the more we have, the more we want, and then we feel entitled to it, even if it was originally understood to be only temporary.  Like Topsy, bureaucracies just grow, and grow and grow.  Another great defect is that bureaucracies resist accountability.  Government bureaucracies all over the world can scarcely be held accountable to those who control the purse strings, and not at all to those whom they ostensibly serve.  The stories of bureaucratic indifference, inefficiency and incompetence are legendary, we have all heard them time and again.  The bigger the bureaucracy the more egregious the outrages it commits.  For the citizen, bureaucracy is the face of government, and it is not smiling.

Taken together these two tendencies are inimical to freedom.  Supposedly bureaucracies do what citizens cannot do.  In actuality, bureaucracies displace citizens from what they have been doing as a matter of course.  Welfare bureaucracies have displaced the family as the source of support in difficult times.  School bureaucracies have replaced parents as the primary educators of children.  In both these cases, as in many others, government bureaucracies produce results that are at best disappointing.  What is worse is that they have become entrenched monopolies which dominate the lives of citizens and dictate what we can and cannot do.  Backed by legal force, government bureaucracies compel the people they ‘serve’ to either become part of the system or suffer criminal, civil and/or economic penalties, rendering them powerless in either case.

The current administration has proposed massive increases in spending for bureaucratic expansion into ever more areas of public and private life, while cleverly hiding the cost which must ultimately be borne by the taxpayer.  The signs are clear: “No tax increase” is rapidly becoming “Mo’ tax increase.”  The corollary to more taxes is more government bureaucracy. This is exactly what we have already seen: using tax dollars the administration has in less than six months engaged in hostile takeovers in the banking, auto, and insurance industries.  More government bureaucracy means more government control and necessarily less freedom for all of us.

This administration’s policies pose a threat to freedom unparalleled in our nation’s history.  If we are to retain our character as a free people these cancerous budgets, bailouts and tax increases must be rescinded.  The window of freedom within which we can act is growing rapidly smaller, we must act now while we are still able.  Write your Congressman, attend a Tea Party, get active in your community, and do it today

Over at Eternity Road Francis Porretto makes an excellent suggestion.  His suggestion is excellent, in fact.  The only thing missing is this piece: once you have made your accusation, demand that the target explain himself.  Demand it over and over.  No matter what the explanation, don’t relent.  Keep demanding.  My only quibble is that this should not be done in a spirit of revenge, but simply as a useful tactic.  This is a tactic that has been used effectively by the Left.  It is time it was taken up and used by the right.

I have been puzzled by the events leading up to the 2008 election.  It seems as if some ancient divine archetypes floated down and attached themselves to Obama and Palin just to make humankind mad.  The deeply visceral reactions both these people have elicited goes far beyond the normal scope and range of human insanity.  People of great notoriety normally attract a smallish number of folks who see them as either divine or demonic and react accordingly.  In the case of these two the numbers of worshipers (in both the positive and negative sense) is greater than expected by several orders of magnitude.

I do not believe in archetypes as having other than mythological reality (Pace, Dr. Jung!), but I am reminded of my father’s admonition to me as a kid, “Whom the gods would destroy they first make angry.”  The original Greek has, I believe, “would first make mad” (as in insane).  This would mean, as I see it, we, as a culture, are in deep doo-doo not so much because of the actions of our national leaders, but because vast swathes of the population have taken leave of their senses.

Via Dr. Sanity and NeoNeocon comes this astonishing but unsurprising development: Repeal the 22nd Amendment.   It would be interesting to see who is behind this and into what web of associations they fit.  Dollars to donuts we’ll see our old friends ACORN and George Soros on the list.