Ron Paul will not make you free

I've had a bad cold all week and I don't even really feel like blogging right now, but I am annoyed and fed up, and what's a blog for if you can't rant, eh?

Whatever my criticisms of Ron Paul himself (and I have many), I recognize common interests with most of his supporters. We are angry about the decline of democracy and the engrossment of executive power under all administrations in the last forty years, especially this latest and most blatantly non-democratic administration. We will have an increase of civil liberties in this country, and a return to the balance of powers envisioned by the creators of our Constitution, or we are going to have a new revolution. While there is a division of opinion on what kind of revolution, the feeling of revolution is pretty universal.

Conservatives are feeling trod upon and want to have a revolution that will give them more freedom. Libertarians are feeling trod upon and want to have a revolution that will give them more freedom. Liberals are always certain that everybody is being trod upon and want a perpetual revolution. And everybody is certain that the freedom they want is going to be for everybody else's good -- whether "everybody else" wants it or not!

My head hurts, my nose hurts, my chest hurts, my arthritis hurts, and I'm not feeling tactful tonight. I say a pox on all your houses!

Freedom of thought is meaningless to you if you don't think. Spending one hour researching the argument against one of your own fixed beliefs will do more to advance your freedom of thought that blowing up ten "Ten Commandment" monuments. Freedom of speech is meaningless unless you speak up. When you edit yourself silent you are under a far more efficient tyranny than anyone else can exercise over you. When was the last time you exercised your freedom to associate, face to face and in person? How often do you communicate with your elected officials and governmental bureaucracies? How can anyone give you the "right to petition" if you don't use it?

Cynicism is nothing but laziness and moral cowardice. "All politicians are corrupt" gives all corrupt politicians carte blanche and lets you out of any responsibility for work. What do you think "self-government" meant? You get to cast a vote every now and then and go fishing the rest of the time?

The freedom that most libertarians are hot about is the freedom to enjoy all of the benefits of living in a highly developed country without paying for any of it. By the chance of birth they inherited electricity, indoor plumbing, public hygiene, interstate roads, the internet, and many other blessings they did not earn or create. The very idea that, having benefited from living in a complex society, they have any personal obligation to help maintain it, outrages them!

Honey, if you can be dropped bare naked into the middle of a virgin forest and build a 21st-century civilization from scratch, I will call you a self-made man and agree that you owe no taxes to anyone. In reality as it is, you and I and every soul alive, from those in the most terrible poverty in the middle of the Sudan to Bill Gates the Glorious, receive far more in life than we ever return.

None of us get any benefit whatsoever out of letting anyone else go hungry, homeless, or sick and untreated. All of us become healthier and more prosperous when we increase the health and prosperity of the poorest and weakest among us. A strong country is one with a strong citizenry -- healthy, well-fed, housed, and educated -- and that is a free country.

So get off your free-rider mentality and start increasing the freedom of everyone around you: freedom from want and disease, freedom to study, freedom to raise a family, freedom to travel, freedom to participate in society. That will increase your personal freedom more than the entire World Wide Web's hooting and hollering for Ron Paul.