Traditional Historic American Values - Part 5: Freedom & Liberty
07/October/2009 09:30 Filed in: Weekly
Column
Volume 11, Issue 39
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Much of the current political discussion in the United States, especially from traditional and conservative paradigms, centers around a pending loss of freedom. A great deal of those discussions concern economic freedom, wealth, or free market principles. The other loci, or the progressive agenda, centers around the ascendance of freedom through the redistribution of wealth from those who have much to those who have a little less.
It is interesting that those who have significant wealth seem to think they earned it. Those who have little wealth seem to think, if they really had a chance economically, they could be wealthy also. There are also a few who just want a handout, for they believe they deserve it, just because they are so special. What is apparent in each of these paradigms is the fact that is all about me, or in this case you!
Have we become so vain that we all think this article is about me, or you?
The Declaration of Independence speaks of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Post-modern Americans seem to think that the sum of these parts ends up as freedom. You would think however, if the Founders of the American republic were articulate enough to understand what they were doing, if they just wanted to promote freedom they would have used the term.
Some of this goes back to the modern myth that the Founders created a democracy, not a republic. If you think things are bad now, if they distributed a dollar to every American citizen, every time a politician, pundit, or other public figure use the word “democracy” to describe the United States designed political system, everyone would be wealthy and everyone would have healthcare, including those who just want a free ride. Furthermore the current national debt would look like spare change.
The founders however used the term liberty and created a representative republic to make it happen. Freedom is really the individual term. Liberty is the moral absolute that makes freedom possible. A representative republic is what is supposed to control excessive limitations or abuses of either.
The dictionary definition of liberty is: The state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views.
In simple terms society creates the environment in which liberty allows freedom to flourish. Traditional value Americans now see this environment being threatened, just as draining the swamp has a drastic effect upon the alligators. Furthermore the whole ecosystem is changed, an ecosystem that took about four hundred years to bring us to where we are today. The alligators are gone, but so are most of the other flora and fauna. What about their liberty?
In 1970 Joni Mitchell wrote a song “Big Yellow Taxi,” which parodied “Take paradise, put up a parking lot,” and “Took all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum - And charged the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em.”
Materially we still have not come to understand the concept of true environmental stewardship, perhaps because our concept of freedom stands in the way.
However the changes of those who support Traditional Historic American Values see what’s happening relates to the reality that the swamp is gone, replaced by the parking lot, and the trees are gone also. Furthermore the parking lot and the tree museum are now being replaced by “too big to fail institutions” that maintain their evolutionary existence because of governmental intrusive cancer.
So in the context of our traditional values series of articles thus far, natural law is being ignored by a human centered religion that seems to think that they are smart enough to control not only the human ecosystems, as in healthcare, but also natural ecosystems, through cap and trade carbon taxes.
The beneficiaries of this cancerous political agenda are not the alligators, nor the birds, bees, and trees. Neither benefiting are the museum and parking lot developers and entrepreneurs. The beneficiaries are bigger is always better - dinosaurs and behemoths. So we as human civilization in the twenty-first century have evolved human enterprises that are ecologically extinct in the natural world. How cool is that?
Well not really! We have lost the real alligators and the whole swamp ecological community. We have lost the small business enterprise sector and all the jobs created by building and maintaining the tree museums and parking lots. Furthermore every creature, including people (created in the image of God) lost the freedom to be what they were designed by God to be.
All of this is taking place currently through the auspices basically of a self-promoted urbane Chicago based community crisis creating and manipulating political structure. The question yet to be answered is whether they can actually manage the crisis environment that they didn’t want to go to waste?
The alligators didn’t just enter this article by chance however. As a general rule many scientists believe that reptiles, such as alligators, turtles, snakes, as well as dinosaurs have the ability to grow continually, directly related to their food supply. In that logic, these human created economic dinosaurs should be able to grow until they exhaust their available nutrition sources.
Now how big real banks, investment banks, stock trading firms, auto companies, insurance companies, unions, healthcare providers, special rights – special interests, and other behemoths can continue to grow may also be limited by their food supply. Since recently, the growth of these institutions has devoured unprecedented amounts of dollars, that feeding frenzy can be expected to continue until all the dollars in the world are consumed.
The major question remains, will these firms then morph into species that can consume the rest of the national dollar denominations, before taking on the ruble, the pound, the euro, the yen, and the yuan? In such a world, money in the traditional sense ceases to be a medium of exchange for goods and services and just a commodity with virtually no intrinsic value.
Since the current dinosaurs, as well as the world’s monetary policy are all determined through human economic and political enlightenment, that growth can continue until they consume the entirety of the world’s monetary wealth with catastrophic results.
The history of the motion picture industry is littered with many human created monsters that cannot be controlled; will the future hold such real monsters for us all?
In a world in which Natural Law rules, if it rules in nature, it will also rule in the nations and tribes of still natural and no longer evolving human created institutions. Then a natural evolutionary religion will no longer hold the answers for leadership and also the rest of us. We will have lost our freedom because liberty has also been consumed in the process of the monetary gluttony, for to continue to create money at the expense of everything else, does and will continue to create non-sustainable debt.
So because, we the people, are seemingly having no input into any of these happenings we need to continue to act as the United States still honors your liberty to pursue your individual freedom to create your own self reliance.
Self-reliance is really the operating paradigm that made the United States the greatest, most powerful nation on earth. At one time it also made America the lender to the whole world. Once we decided to help others through government intervention rather than through true charity, everything slowly became inundated by the flood of debt, creating the economic alligator and reptile-infested swamps.
So today true charity does not exist, for we all know that the government will take care of all the problems and hence we no longer have a guilty conscience because we used this progressive freedom to pamper our own idolatry with basically consumer kitsch and hence feed the economic dinosaurs with our credit card debt.
The Traditional Historic American Value is to find liberty in becoming debt free. Contrary to many Christians I consider credit to be an asset, just like stocks, bonds, real estate. But just as any other real asset it must be used wisely in the pursuit of true wealth production. If it doesn’t work that way and you loose your credit, it must be held lightly, for the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, just as with all other tangibles and intangibles of this life.
Just say no, to credit that allows you to live beyond your means. Most of that credit goes to feed the economic dinosaurs, as little as possible goes to the people who create, manufacture, distribute and sell the stuff. As a consequence we have lost the freedom to live in a world in which the liberty of self-determination can flourish. Through the choice not to feed the dinosaurs, we can alter flow of dollars into the swamp. But it doesn’t stop there.
If we want to “restore” Traditional Historic American Values, we need to promote a common religion of those values that America’s Founders risked their lives to create out of the natural resources of the continent. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must become an evangelistic “revitalization.” The concept of “re”-something means doing something again, which entropy has lost over time. You can plug “re” in front of just about any verb, and it makes sense.
Too big to fail dinosaurs, fed by government ex nihilo money creation, can’t “re” anything. They can only continue to grow ex-acerbating their current currency. Collectively we need to use our constitutional liberty to drain the swamp, to hold those accountable who feed the behemoths.
Contrary to what you read or see in the mainstream media, there are serious structural problems in the land, and throwing more funny money at it is not going to change the situation. We have moved beyond the point where free lunches are going to have an impact. Tough decisions are going to have to be made, which demand true leadership. True leadership is the reality that has been lost through the rise of the intrusive cancer of government.
Many point to Ronald Reagan as the patron saint of recent traditional values. He however is used in simplistic spin of a complex time. The fall of the Soviet Union was caused by basically bankrupting the communist state. However that was done through greatly increasing American domestic deficit spending while at the same time cutting taxes. At the time that was known as “voodoo economics.”
Republican control of both the presidency and the congress began this extension of voodoo economics that led to the current economic recession. The current Democrat control of the government has installed essentially the same players, and given them a crisis by which they seek to devalue free markets through the redistribution of wealth. The significant problems are the wealth is gone and dinosaur swamp games are not going to change that reality.
Hoping to fly on Pterodactyl wings of change to a new promised land is not going to happen. That is not change you can believe in. The only hope for the United States and the world is understanding that wealth is created through liberty and the application of Natural Law.
By definition the United States is currently heading in the wrong direction. President Obama is just following a course that has misguided the nation for at least half a century. The problem now however, is that the errors have reached critical mass. So keeping with our current metaphors, the dinosaur swamps are rapidly encroaching on the land needed to produce revitalization. This is climate change you can believe in.
A new course requires that we seek to create new opportunities through individual initiatives. This is going to require a new sort of leadership. These two, opportunity and leadership, we will attempt to provide some guidance as we continue this Traditional Historic American Values series next week.
Podcast
>>PDF copy
>>Print view
Much of the current political discussion in the United States, especially from traditional and conservative paradigms, centers around a pending loss of freedom. A great deal of those discussions concern economic freedom, wealth, or free market principles. The other loci, or the progressive agenda, centers around the ascendance of freedom through the redistribution of wealth from those who have much to those who have a little less.
It is interesting that those who have significant wealth seem to think they earned it. Those who have little wealth seem to think, if they really had a chance economically, they could be wealthy also. There are also a few who just want a handout, for they believe they deserve it, just because they are so special. What is apparent in each of these paradigms is the fact that is all about me, or in this case you!
Have we become so vain that we all think this article is about me, or you?
The Declaration of Independence speaks of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Post-modern Americans seem to think that the sum of these parts ends up as freedom. You would think however, if the Founders of the American republic were articulate enough to understand what they were doing, if they just wanted to promote freedom they would have used the term.
Some of this goes back to the modern myth that the Founders created a democracy, not a republic. If you think things are bad now, if they distributed a dollar to every American citizen, every time a politician, pundit, or other public figure use the word “democracy” to describe the United States designed political system, everyone would be wealthy and everyone would have healthcare, including those who just want a free ride. Furthermore the current national debt would look like spare change.
The founders however used the term liberty and created a representative republic to make it happen. Freedom is really the individual term. Liberty is the moral absolute that makes freedom possible. A representative republic is what is supposed to control excessive limitations or abuses of either.
The dictionary definition of liberty is: The state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views.
In simple terms society creates the environment in which liberty allows freedom to flourish. Traditional value Americans now see this environment being threatened, just as draining the swamp has a drastic effect upon the alligators. Furthermore the whole ecosystem is changed, an ecosystem that took about four hundred years to bring us to where we are today. The alligators are gone, but so are most of the other flora and fauna. What about their liberty?
In 1970 Joni Mitchell wrote a song “Big Yellow Taxi,” which parodied “Take paradise, put up a parking lot,” and “Took all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum - And charged the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em.”
Materially we still have not come to understand the concept of true environmental stewardship, perhaps because our concept of freedom stands in the way.
However the changes of those who support Traditional Historic American Values see what’s happening relates to the reality that the swamp is gone, replaced by the parking lot, and the trees are gone also. Furthermore the parking lot and the tree museum are now being replaced by “too big to fail institutions” that maintain their evolutionary existence because of governmental intrusive cancer.
So in the context of our traditional values series of articles thus far, natural law is being ignored by a human centered religion that seems to think that they are smart enough to control not only the human ecosystems, as in healthcare, but also natural ecosystems, through cap and trade carbon taxes.
The beneficiaries of this cancerous political agenda are not the alligators, nor the birds, bees, and trees. Neither benefiting are the museum and parking lot developers and entrepreneurs. The beneficiaries are bigger is always better - dinosaurs and behemoths. So we as human civilization in the twenty-first century have evolved human enterprises that are ecologically extinct in the natural world. How cool is that?
Well not really! We have lost the real alligators and the whole swamp ecological community. We have lost the small business enterprise sector and all the jobs created by building and maintaining the tree museums and parking lots. Furthermore every creature, including people (created in the image of God) lost the freedom to be what they were designed by God to be.
All of this is taking place currently through the auspices basically of a self-promoted urbane Chicago based community crisis creating and manipulating political structure. The question yet to be answered is whether they can actually manage the crisis environment that they didn’t want to go to waste?
The alligators didn’t just enter this article by chance however. As a general rule many scientists believe that reptiles, such as alligators, turtles, snakes, as well as dinosaurs have the ability to grow continually, directly related to their food supply. In that logic, these human created economic dinosaurs should be able to grow until they exhaust their available nutrition sources.
Now how big real banks, investment banks, stock trading firms, auto companies, insurance companies, unions, healthcare providers, special rights – special interests, and other behemoths can continue to grow may also be limited by their food supply. Since recently, the growth of these institutions has devoured unprecedented amounts of dollars, that feeding frenzy can be expected to continue until all the dollars in the world are consumed.
The major question remains, will these firms then morph into species that can consume the rest of the national dollar denominations, before taking on the ruble, the pound, the euro, the yen, and the yuan? In such a world, money in the traditional sense ceases to be a medium of exchange for goods and services and just a commodity with virtually no intrinsic value.
Since the current dinosaurs, as well as the world’s monetary policy are all determined through human economic and political enlightenment, that growth can continue until they consume the entirety of the world’s monetary wealth with catastrophic results.
The history of the motion picture industry is littered with many human created monsters that cannot be controlled; will the future hold such real monsters for us all?
In a world in which Natural Law rules, if it rules in nature, it will also rule in the nations and tribes of still natural and no longer evolving human created institutions. Then a natural evolutionary religion will no longer hold the answers for leadership and also the rest of us. We will have lost our freedom because liberty has also been consumed in the process of the monetary gluttony, for to continue to create money at the expense of everything else, does and will continue to create non-sustainable debt.
So because, we the people, are seemingly having no input into any of these happenings we need to continue to act as the United States still honors your liberty to pursue your individual freedom to create your own self reliance.
Self-reliance is really the operating paradigm that made the United States the greatest, most powerful nation on earth. At one time it also made America the lender to the whole world. Once we decided to help others through government intervention rather than through true charity, everything slowly became inundated by the flood of debt, creating the economic alligator and reptile-infested swamps.
So today true charity does not exist, for we all know that the government will take care of all the problems and hence we no longer have a guilty conscience because we used this progressive freedom to pamper our own idolatry with basically consumer kitsch and hence feed the economic dinosaurs with our credit card debt.
The Traditional Historic American Value is to find liberty in becoming debt free. Contrary to many Christians I consider credit to be an asset, just like stocks, bonds, real estate. But just as any other real asset it must be used wisely in the pursuit of true wealth production. If it doesn’t work that way and you loose your credit, it must be held lightly, for the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, just as with all other tangibles and intangibles of this life.
Just say no, to credit that allows you to live beyond your means. Most of that credit goes to feed the economic dinosaurs, as little as possible goes to the people who create, manufacture, distribute and sell the stuff. As a consequence we have lost the freedom to live in a world in which the liberty of self-determination can flourish. Through the choice not to feed the dinosaurs, we can alter flow of dollars into the swamp. But it doesn’t stop there.
If we want to “restore” Traditional Historic American Values, we need to promote a common religion of those values that America’s Founders risked their lives to create out of the natural resources of the continent. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must become an evangelistic “revitalization.” The concept of “re”-something means doing something again, which entropy has lost over time. You can plug “re” in front of just about any verb, and it makes sense.
Too big to fail dinosaurs, fed by government ex nihilo money creation, can’t “re” anything. They can only continue to grow ex-acerbating their current currency. Collectively we need to use our constitutional liberty to drain the swamp, to hold those accountable who feed the behemoths.
Contrary to what you read or see in the mainstream media, there are serious structural problems in the land, and throwing more funny money at it is not going to change the situation. We have moved beyond the point where free lunches are going to have an impact. Tough decisions are going to have to be made, which demand true leadership. True leadership is the reality that has been lost through the rise of the intrusive cancer of government.
Many point to Ronald Reagan as the patron saint of recent traditional values. He however is used in simplistic spin of a complex time. The fall of the Soviet Union was caused by basically bankrupting the communist state. However that was done through greatly increasing American domestic deficit spending while at the same time cutting taxes. At the time that was known as “voodoo economics.”
Republican control of both the presidency and the congress began this extension of voodoo economics that led to the current economic recession. The current Democrat control of the government has installed essentially the same players, and given them a crisis by which they seek to devalue free markets through the redistribution of wealth. The significant problems are the wealth is gone and dinosaur swamp games are not going to change that reality.
Hoping to fly on Pterodactyl wings of change to a new promised land is not going to happen. That is not change you can believe in. The only hope for the United States and the world is understanding that wealth is created through liberty and the application of Natural Law.
By definition the United States is currently heading in the wrong direction. President Obama is just following a course that has misguided the nation for at least half a century. The problem now however, is that the errors have reached critical mass. So keeping with our current metaphors, the dinosaur swamps are rapidly encroaching on the land needed to produce revitalization. This is climate change you can believe in.
A new course requires that we seek to create new opportunities through individual initiatives. This is going to require a new sort of leadership. These two, opportunity and leadership, we will attempt to provide some guidance as we continue this Traditional Historic American Values series next week.
Podcast