Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Politics is an insane form of lunatic theatre obsessed over, and participated in, by only Fools, damnfools, willful idiots, and monsters. It is a cluster of irrational irrelevancies that all snowball together until such time as the God-given freedoms guaranteed to the citizenry by whatever passes for a Constitution of its given country are finally stripped from them by the very elected officials selected by said willing victims to safeguard them. This inevitably leads to one thing: revolution.

So, given that we have seen this, countless times over the thousands of years of written history, why is it continuing to happen? The incomparable Robert A. Heinlein, amongst others, said that those who don’t know the past are doomed to repeat it. Given the sorry state of what passes for history classes in public schools in this country, I can see why this current generation is ignorant of the past, and is therefor rushing headlong into a repeat course of it. Though it doesn’t have to be this way. There is still a way to pull their heads out of the sand, to awaken them to the reality of history, one that doesn’t begin and end with America as the Evil Empire, and Alexander Hamilton as the only good Founding Father.

Over the course of four years homeschooling my daughters I have gone out of my way to supplement their historical education with readings of Common Sense, The Decleration of Independence, and The Constitution of the United States, along with whatever other pieces of brilliant history that I can get my greedy little hands on, from McCullough to Stokesburry. Recently we started reading a series of ethical books for children, aimed at raising a freedom-loving generation, touting primarily Libertarian political beliefs in easily digestible fashion. In one such, read just this morning in fact, we were introduced to the works (in an admittedly abbreviated form) of Frederic Bastiat. Amongst the other pearls of wisdom found in the book was this quote: “Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”

This being the case, and I can find no reason to disagree with the late Mr. Bastiat on this front, and that our freedoms existed before there were men and women in power to regulate and strip them from us, is it not also the case that the more power we give them, the thicker are the bars of our cells? And why is it that we are so readily able to trust those in power that we more or less agree with, if we so dislike and distrust those that we find unpleasant? To put it mildly, no one is so trustworthy as to be given free reign with those fundamental rights that give us the ability to thrive.

To use another quote from the late Mr. Bastiat: “If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is nor safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”

And that’s what so much of it comes down to, isn’t it? A whole political party, who are at the front lines at calling their opponents racist, or sexist, or elitist, or homophobic, who see themselves as so superior, so much greater than, their fellow citizens that they never see us as equals. They see a man, and instantly call him sexist based on nothing more than the fact of his birth, yet would never concede that this instant identification as a predator is in itself sexist. They see a caucasian and instantly decry racism, ignoring the fact that to see race first and react with animosity is in itself an act of racism. They call the Right elitist, ignoring the foundation of their twisted belief system, which is that they know better than we do just what we need.

They are the elite. The same elite that rounded up Jews before and during the second World War. The same elite that ground 20th century Russian history into the bloody snow. They are the elite that would protect your right to abort a baby completely unable to defend itself, but not your right to self defense in the face of overcoming adversity.

I am not elite. Like everyone that I associate with I am a nothing. Just another grunt unimportant in the greater scheme of things, but loved by those who love me and ignored by those that don’t. I’ve never judged a man or woman based on something beyond their control, but will call down heavenly fire on those that conciously act on impulses that I find amoral or evil, regardless of those same things that may be beyond their control. I don’t care if you’re a man, woman, white, black, gay, or straight. You all have the same worth, or lack thereof, as anyone else in the whole world. But simultaneously I will not cut you any slack based on the color of your skin, or the positioning of your genitals, or who you like to wake up to in the morning, than I would someone in a different position. We’re all equal or none of us are, and to look at the world, and see some as having more or less worth than others based on useless data is bigotry, and one that the Democrats flout with impunity because there’s no one willing to call them on it that they will ever listen to.

Every time I vote I feel dirty, like I just had to sleep with the landlord to pay the rent. I hate that feeling, and know that in time my children, and theirs, and onward into the immeasurably distant future, will have to have those cold shower moments. And it makes me sick. But it is what it is, and until such time as there are people in office that deserve to be there by doing nothing to rip from their fellow citizens their freedoms, or retain power through fear mongering and hate, those moments will be with us. But that doesn’t mean that we have to roll over for the fools, damnfools, willful idiots, or monsters. We can educate our children, show them a better ideal, and pray to God that they have a more successful time making things what they’re supposed to be than we have.