The illusion of freedom
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In our country, we always hear “the land of the free,” but when you sit back and think about it, are we really that free? We do have a lot of freedoms here that other countries do not have, but I have been thinking about this and how far we have drifted away from what the framers of the constitution meant for this country. They intended to create a new form of government that balanced power between the federal and state levels thus preventing tyranny. We the people have gotten smaller as Big Brother government has increased. This is a far cry from what was intended by the founding fathers.
One example of this is property taxes. You never really own your land free and clear. You pay taxes on it for the rest of your life, and whoever you leave it to pays taxes on the same land for the rest of their life or until they sell it. If the taxes are not paid the county will seize it and auction it off to the highest bidder. If you own enough property, when you die your family has to pay inheritance tax. This is equivalent to renting your own property from the government. I know of instances where someone had valuable land close to a developing part near I-95. They did not want to sell because it had been in the family for over 100 years. The county continued to raise property taxes to try and force them to sell.
The government is good at hiring people to do a job, then hiring more people to do the job that the original hire does not want to do causing exponential growth at the taxpayers’ expense. Anytime a major problem arises people start hollering for Big Brother to step in and make laws or mandates. How free are we if the government can mandate vaccines for people to work or for children to go to school? The government does not own our autonomy. Herd mentality is strong when it comes to fear. This fear is driven by the media and the government. Benjamin Franklin stated, “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety.”
We have become so dependent on the government as a society that when things happen, we start crying out for governmental intervention. Those interventions always come at a price in the end, and the price is put on the taxpayers back. Our conditional freedom reminds me of Pharaoh and the Israelites in the Bible when they were trying to leave Egypt. Pharaoh told them they could go worship and sacrifice to God but kept putting his conditions on it. Moses kept coming before him until he finally let God’s people go. We need to be more like Moses and do whatever it takes to keep pushing and fighting for real freedom, not conditional freedom. In Patrick Henry’s speech to the Second Virginia Convention, his closing line was, “give me liberty or give me death.” We the people need to get back the spirit that our founding fathers had and put Big Brother government back in line where it belongs.
