BE REAL — HOW FREE DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

Acclaimed historian, author and public speaker Paul Johnson, in a lecture entitled, Individual Liberty and Private Property, said, “The curse of bureaucracy has never been heavier, the number of regulations more numerous, or the cost of resistance more ruinous.” There are at least two takeaways from this.

FIRST TAKEAWAY: Where there is no individual liberty, there is no private property, and where there is no private property there is no individual liberty.

SECOND TAKEAWAY: In a country where government is supposed to be administered by people elected by the people, we have had and are having our rights relative to liberty and the ownership of private property taken away to the point of non-existence. And this has been and is being done by what is the equivalent of an occupying army in government bureaucracy — unelected men and women who arbitrarily, unconstitutionally and therefore illegally, make and enforce laws and regulations that in effect take away our liberty and our right to own private property.

Here’s what will be either a “newsflash,” a “wakeup call” or an “interesting tidbit" for some: We have now come to a place in America where we have only as much liberty as the government says we have, and can exercise the rights of private ownership only to the degree that government says we can; and this is subject to the day-to-day whims of the government.

Real property ownership is restricted to who makes the final decision as to how it’s used and how long it will be kept, etc. Americans now pay “fees” AKA Taxes) annually to government to maintain the charade and the nice, fuzzy feeling it gives them to think that they themselves own something.

A short lesson in American history: A primary reasons for the Revolutionary War was the objection taken to a tax that amounted to a tiny fraction of a penny—a tax that a bunch of non-elected, elitist bureaucrats decided to impose on Americans. It wasn’t the amount of money, but the principle involved that mattered; the understanding that ideas have consequences, including the ideas of egomaniacal, tyrannical, stupid ideas of those in government that directly impose on and threaten the liberty and rights of Americans. But then all this happened in the not so distant, but largely forgotten time when Americans valued things like principles, when character counted and when they didn’t believed in taxation on the basis of representation. (Please share this if you can).