Home America socialism A Nation of Free Men or Free Things
Home America socialism A Nation of Free Men or Free Things

A Nation of Free Men or Free Things

The 2020 Democrat primaries are underway with candidate after candidate promising a nation, not of free people, but of free things.

Free college, free health care and free everything else. Even for illegal aliens.

Of course there's a price to pay.

You get free health care by giving up the freedom to pick your own health care. You get free education, but the indoctrination is the price.

The Fourth to many is Fireworks Day. Every country has its fireworks days and this is the day that this one chooses to light up the night sky. The day means nothing to them because though they are surrounded by free things, they aren’t free. 

The difference between freedom and free things has been progressively erased so that many think that the American Revolution was fought because the British weren’t providing affordable health coverage to the colonies. If only they knew about the NHS, they would vote to go back.

All that the Crown really wanted was for the colonists to pay their “fair share”, a share that was determined thousands of miles away. All that the colonists wanted was the rights of Englishmen that they believed they were entitled to. After a great deal of bloodshed, the colonists won the right to be Americans instead—an odd series of consonants and vowels having to do with an Italian explorer but meaning free and limited government.

There is a big difference between a free country and a country of free things. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both. A free country isn’t obsessed with free riders, only a country of free things obsesses with making everyone pay their fair share for the benefit of the people who want the free things. The rugged individualism of Colonial America has given way to stifling crowds, co-dependent on each other, lined shoulder to shoulder, clutching at each other’s wallets, crying, “Take from him and give to me.”

We are a nation overflowing with the right to things paid for with other people’s money. A nation where the government gives you food, housing and education; while Walmart gives you cheap products made in China, that used to be made in America, back when people were able to afford health care, housing and food without having to pick each other’s pockets.

The fireworks that shoot up in a wonderland of blue and red, silver and gold, are a faint echo of the real thing, the gunpowder that blasted back and forth between the lines of government troops, their Hessian mercenaries and the rebel colonists who chose to ride free, rather than bend their necks to the plans of an expanding empire. The faint smell of gunpowder and the dark shapes of the barges only mime the war that was fought here. 

Did so many men risk their lives just to end up with a system that made the one they escaped seem positively libertarian by comparison? If they had known that they were going to end up with the NHS, death panels that will eventually adopt some version of the Liverpool Care Pathway’s euthanasia protocol, and a co-dependent system where everyone is looted for the greater good of the looters—they might have stayed home on their farms, sadly watching the fighting from a distance.

JFK’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” was always a hollow lie. Half the country is expected to ask what their country can do for them, while the other half is expected to ask what they can do for their country. This simmering civil war is often pegged as a class war, but it isn’t about class. There are billionaires and paupers on both sides, and the divide cuts across the Middle Class, dividing those who derive their income from private business from those who receive it from government and government-subsidized employment.

The Fourth of July is Independence Day, but every other day is Co-Dependence Day, the days we celebrate our integration, our volunteerism and our compliance with a vast system which makes everyone dependent on the government and which makes the government dependent on everyone who still works for someone other than the government—including the freest of free riders, who work for themselves. Empires function by draining every drop from their possessions to cover their costs. The British Crown tried to drain America to pay down its debt, resulting in growing protests from the population and eventually a revolution. Now the Empire of Co-Dependency is draining its independent subjects for the benefit of its dependent subjects and the dependency infrastructure that employs its numberless bureaucrats who govern it all. 

The American Revolution was not a struggle for another nation, one of many, but for a free nation. It was not split off to accommodate the national strivings of an ethnic group or their historical destiny. Its guiding idea, like its national holiday, was independence, but independence means very little unless it reaches the individual.

A nation where everyone is part of one great co-dependent community, a centrally planned marketplace that can only be balanced if everyone is forced to buy what they are told to buy, is not a free nation. It will not even be independent for long. The logic of co-dependence is to expand that dependency beyond the borders and make the region and then every part the world dependent on one another to balance out the numbers.

The new Crown is not a person, it is an idea. The throne at whose foot a formerly free people kneel is the golden seat of the welfare state. While the fireworks light up the sky, a counterrevolution undid the revolution. There is a new king and his face is on every magazine cover in the land. His bounty is a jagged bear trap that turns everyone into a ward of the state at their own expense.

As the last wave of fireworks die out, the shooting stars sinking to earth and vanishing into the darkness, the light of Independence Day fades and the crowds slowly trudge away from the brief spectacle, past the lines of police barricades, through narrow streets, past government buildings, back to their co-dependent lives in a co-dependent nation where the will of the people and the rights of the individual matter less than the latest proposal to solve the problems of their independence by making the country a more dependent place.

A few hundred years ago in these streets, men and women celebrated the end of tyranny, and in its darkest hour, lines of grim men marched along the waterfront up to the highest point on the island to mount a final defense. Sometimes the older buildings still wear their shadows on their brick walls and by the golden light of the fireworks you can almost see them, shadows moving in the darkness, their footsteps taking them north, a faint song on their lips, muskets in their hands, their lives lost and gained in defense of their freedom. 

Comments

  1. I always enjoy your perspective, Mr. Sultan.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mr. Greenfield,
    Sir, you are a voice crying out in the wilderness. Your words speak truth like few others, plus they move me in ways few others do. America is truly at a crossroads, one which our People will either rise up to challenge then correct all the ills that are destroying us, or it will be utterly destroyed relegating it to the dustbin of history to become little more than another has been nation.

    I pray every day that it is the former for God did not Bless us for us to squander His Blessing so recklessly, though in our defense, we did not understand just how thoroughly evil took hold of our so-called "leaders", corrupting them so completely that they have literally become no different than the tyrants they supposedly sent our fine warriors to fight in so many wars, most of which they actually helped to create.

    This video demonstrates just how evil our government has become. Every American should watch this for it will open your eyes like nothing else, perhaps enough to motivate Americans to take the steps needed to finally rid our country of the evil that pervades every inch of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ObvK4NR_LI

    God CAN Bless America again, but only AFTER we repent! Then you, Mr. Greenfield, for your outstanding efforts to awaken Americans to the truth.

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  3. The best ever sir. Worth a double read.

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  4. Anonymous4/7/19

    > You get free education, but the indoctrination is the price.

    Not just free, but mandatory! As in, "parents might see prison time if you don't attend."

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous4/7/19

    Among first world nations, America excels
    because of our love of personal freedom.
    The condescending European disdain for our
    “cowboy-ness” explains how easily they have
    allowed false virtue to Islamize them.

    Let’s never forget that there is no higher
    good than Individual Sovereignty.

    Charlie

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  6. As an English person, we look to you and your great country to show us that the slide to Eurohell is not inevitable. To see that your great nation is infected by the French philosophical cancer of Post Modernism, now even post logic? Truly scary. Surely we all know our Gramsci and Alinsky? This is a rotten faux comfort they're offering . Must every generation have to learn this?

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  7. I cant figure out what you meant by "the right to be Americans instead—an odd series of consonants and vowels having to do with an Italian explorer but meaning free and limited government.
    ". Any help available? Otherwise perfect as usual.

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  8. Anonymous9/7/19

    In the City of Angels, Democrat Mayor Garcetti complained that the attempted end run around Prop. 13, a property tax that taxed properties based on square area, failed to pass even though a special election was held to push it through.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous9/7/19

    Amerigo Vespucci was the mapmaker whose name graces the continent.
    ,,Michelle

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  10. Anonymous9/7/19

    amerigo vespucci

    ReplyDelete
  11. Aggressive Pan-handlers are the default template of today's Democrats.

    Beg. Threaten. Take. Then beg for more. When the mark tries to walk around the bum, the panhandler moves to block his escape.

    What indefatigable bores they are, and a constant dampener on our private enterprises and personal joys.

    Aggressive Pan-handlers is all they are. Not Noble fighters for the public good!

    Like a nagging hemorrhoid or an immobile kidney stone, the Democrat-run cities' serial distresses have, ever since I started paying attention in the seventies, served to incapacitate the nation and disable its ability to heal or fight wars or to enact rational long-term economic policy.

    The reckoning for this deliberate domestic rabble-rousing is long past due!

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  12. "Aggressive Pan-handlers." Use this rhetorical shiv on your Lefty interlocutors. It really works!

    ReplyDelete
  13. Anonymous2/9/19

    I'm going to check on solar panels for cold climates.

    ReplyDelete

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