“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” – C.S. Lewis
When was the last time you won a political argument with someone who held a different belief than you? No one really wins such a conversation; some merely end up looking more stupid than others. So why do we continue?
There can be no doubt that the opinion on the role of government among Americans is exceptionally diverse. Excluding malicious extremists, our desires for government involvement go from near-anarchy to full-on socialism. Honestly, that’s fine with us. Your opinion is yours to have. People’s opinions only become problematic when they’re shoved down someone else’s throat.
Our legislators are trying as hard as they can to fit an amorphous-blob-shaped peg into a square hole. They will never accomplish this, but with each attempt they further smash the blob-shaped peg with a hammer, disfiguring it and breaking it until it “fits.” Our founders, however, wrote a simple Constitution, and for good reason: it appropriately fit the great majority of people.
Before our federal government grew into an out-of-control spending machine, people were free to live in cities and states that accurately matched their ideal government. Under such a system, one state could have socialized medicine and the other could have completely private medicine. In the former, you’d be guaranteed health insurance, but it would provide somewhat lower-quality care and ultimately cost you more. In the latter, you would have less-expensive and higher-quality health insurance but you take a risk of losing it if you suddenly lose your income. But it was your own choice.
Our Constitution is truly a great document. But when power-grabbing politicians ignore its tenets in an effort to force everyone to conform to an ideal with which few agree, we end up where we are today: severe distrust in government, politicians willing to slander anyone who doesn’t hold the same beliefs, and out-of-control spending threatening to collapse the entire economy of not only this nation but all other nations reliant on the security of our currency. So here’s a [not so] novel idea: stop trying to marginalize the people and instead spend your time opening the doors for us to live life the way we choose. I can’t even think of the last bill congress passed which actually universally expanded liberties.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” Supposing that one person’s opinion is more valuable than that of another is, without contestation, a one-way ticket toward self-destruction.
