The American debate is not left vs right, it’s safety vs freedom

It’s been my experience, speaking to hundreds and hundreds of people about politics over the last few years, that the current polarization in the United States is less about liberalism versus conservatism and more about a dissonance that surrounds the idea of government’s purpose.

Take a look at the high percentage of Independent voters. According to a recent Gallup poll, the majority of voters since 2004 identify as independents. They see that neither of the two major parties are logically consistent in their approach to governance.

Democrats say an adult should be able to decide what to put into his body - if it’s pot. But if you choose to smoke tobacco, you have no friends on the left. They say they’re keeping us safe by restricting access to firearms, but they continue fund the Military-Industrial complex and never mention the hundreds of thousands of innocent lives that have been claimed overseas by our bombs and bullets.

The GOP, on the other hand, say the religious should be able to live their lives as they choose, but not the drug users, the LGBT community or those they deem as a threat to the American way. They say you should be able to keep more of your money but refuse to consider spending less of it. They say they want to support the troops, but they keep sending them off to die in unjust wars.

People aren’t as stupid as the politicians think they are. They see the hipocrisy. They see the ways the system has failed, the way it’s become corrupted by lies, cronyism and back room deals. They know it’s not contained to one side of the aisle, so they’re hesitant to vote for either. What polarizes these people is the fact that they can’t seem to agree on the solution to the problem.

People who fall into this category tend to be mostly civil libertarians. People who champion equal rights and freedoms for all, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or anything else.

This is good.

Where those people divide most are the ways in which we implement those equalities. Libertarians will suggest lifting restrictions on all people that tend to unfairly target undermined groups. For example, the war on drugs hurts Americans of all colors, but it disproportionately hurts black men and women. Those opposed to us argue that more government action to prevent discrimination is what’s needed.

Let us first take a look at the fundamentals of government action. All things cost money, and all government money, with a few exceptions, is taken involuntarily from citizens either in the present day or the citizens of the future by taking on debt. Some say “I’m happy to pay my taxes and do my share,” but some of us could really use that money. I pay more a month in taxes than I do in rent.

Second, it helps to put these arguments in perspective when you consider this fact: all government is a monopoly on the use of force. The use of force against someone who has violated no one’s rights should be viewed as immoral. It is the idea of freedom from this force that America was founded on. Taking money from you, brutally killing unarmed people, the destruction of private property and forcing you to participate in an act you disagree with would all mean jail time for any of us, but it’s business as usual for government.

Why is that ok?

Why do we not reserve forceful intervention for those who have committed a crime? Well, why do Democrats want to restrict gun access for people who may break the law some day and why do Republicans assume all Muslims want to suicide bomb us? They want to “keep us safe.”

One of the places where government is most interested in our “safety” is in the market place. They manipulate wages, prices, profits, interest, consumer behavior and currency as a whole in an effort to keep the economy stable. What they don’t seem to realize is that every dollar they take from the private sector is one less dollar a worker will be paid. Every time the success of a particular industry is artificially sustained, another industry’s failure is artificially sustained. Every time new money is ejected into the economy, the dollars held by the working poor are worth that much less.

These programs destroy jobs and the value of the dollar. It prevents people from
getting the goods and services they want because government thinks they know better what those people need. Government spending creates bubbles that burst, and then they create more money to stimulate spending, which then causes the economic recovery process to be extended. Compare the recovery times for the crash of 1987, after which little government action was taken, to the recession of 2008, which, despite Obama’s stimulus package, we are still recovering from in many ways.

Then there’s the regulatory state, which is supposed to keep us safe but instead forces hair braiders a to earn full cosmetology licenses and children selling lemonade to acquire a business permit. It drives up the cost of doing business while it’s policies (90 percent of the time) do nothing to improve the overall quality of life for Americans.

Liberty is a human right, like life and property and the pursuit of happiness. We don’t need the government to tell us how to live our lives, we just it to preserve our ability to live as we choose.