Propertarial Liberty

There are those who do not understand the purpose of liberty. They see liberty now as it has been described by those who see no value in it for the common man. It is a word to them to motivate the masses to accept what? To accept the yoke. Liberty is the excuse they have for their tyranny. Why liberty would mean chaos, right? People doing whatever they want: disobeying traffic signs; failing to pay taxes; wandering aimless across the plains of America; corporations dumping waste into rivers and streams; etc, because to them, liberty is dangerous and fraught with consequences to others. This is not liberty. Liberty is the freedom of movement without hindering the liberty of others. It is fraught not with consequences, but with responsibility.

The liberty to mine coal does not relieve the corporation involved in operating the mine of responsibilities to the health of the workers, or the vitality of the environment. To ensure this, the federal government has established laws that cannot be manipulated by corporate influence over the state and local governments. It has done this to respond to actual dangers in the past, but it, as always, assumed powers that it didn't have, exercised force where it was prohibited, instituted regulations it had no right to institute. In order to control the mining of coal, it destroyed the Constitution. Which is worse?

The very idea of liberty is to ensure that no one is FORCED into the mine. Now, I recognize socio-economic leverage that might drive a person into a mine against one's better judgment concerning their health, but is it better to allow the government to ultimately, having shed the restrictions of the governing document, assume the role of denying those willing, or even hesitant workers of the right to take that risk, to assume that burden if the result is an inability to feed one's family? Is it the government's role to deny the sacrifice one person might make to send others of his family to college and provide an example of a reason to better one's condition? Understand that allowing the federal government to become the dictator of one's future, either in a mine or out of it is the same thing. Denying one the opportunity to risk is exactly the same as demanding one take that risk.

The federal government has assumed the role of dictating where and when a refinery might be built or expanded. The result is that a new refinery has not been built in decades and the permitting process is so onerous that none are even scheduled. The lives that are damaged, the economic impact of importing refined gasoline, forcing those jobs overseas, does nothing other than increase the cost of living to those who do not have jobs and cannot now afford the gasoline to go to work, driving them into poverty.

It is this very understanding of liberty that goes unnoticed. The government cannot act without consequences any better than liberty can be pursued without consequences, the question is: Who gets to make the life and death decisions in the equation? Where that decision is made by the government there is tyranny and oppression, where that decision is made by an individual there is liberty.

How many families remain in poverty and unemployed due to the decision of the Obama Administration to put a halt to the Keystone pipeline? Consider that many of these pipeline construction workers have been unemployed and destitute because it now takes an act of congress and the consent of the President to put them to work. Were liberty to flourish there would be no recession. Roll back regulations and American workers would be employed, their children fed, their lives enriched. Energy would be abundant and available, taxes would be paid and received.

The forces of the environmental movement have done as much to starve and bankrupt this nation as any bankster or hedge fund operator. One might only listen to the ravings of Nancy Pelosi to see the true mind behind the economic disaster that awaits us all. In the idea that paying unemployment benefits is the same as putting people to work is as insipid as it gets. There is a huge difference between putting money into circulation via debt and putting money into circulation via production. It is the difference between buying something on credit and building a table and spending the profits. One is simply paper accounting and the other is an economic transaction.

When the government pays out a benefit, like unemployment, it has taken funds from the profits of a person who has built a table, who has less funds and must spend less before building another table. Too many benefits need to be paid and the person building tables can no longer afford to build them. The idea that the answer to the economic troubles we are in is to increase benefits to be paid is not only stupid, it is insane.

There is such a thing as propertarial liberty, the liberty afforded to one by virtue of their property, be it money, land or possessions. Governmental regulations drain propertarial liberty, restrict the movement of commerce and the individual. It drains the economy of the flow of blood and diverts it to those who do nothing, who produce nothing but breath. The greater the load on the first, the less there is available to the latter. At a tipping point such as we are, the blood has left the head and soon will leave the heart and the engine will stop.

My calls for liberty are not just to ensure that I am able to swing my fist all day long, but to ensure the propertarial liberty of the individual and therefore continue the economic flow of blood to all extremities.