I am a passionate believer in freedom, both yours and mine…our freedom of speech…our freedom of religion…our freedom of the press…our economic freedom…our freedom from excessive regulation and taxation…and our freedom to pursue our own happiness in our own way. Our freedoms should be constrained only when their exercise unfairly abuses the freedom of someone else.
It was the foresight of our Founding Fathers not to take these freedoms from us. For it was these freedoms which empowered our people to establish and grow our nation, and to prosper like no other people ever have. In less than two centuries, the United States of America became the most powerful nation on earth, and it citizens came to enjoy the highest standard of living ever know.
When people are free from excessive restraints, and encouraged to pursue their own happiness in their own way, they can realize their inherent power of self fulfillment, a power given at birth by our Creator. People can then achieve a sustained sense of well being. Unleashing this power, and encouraging its use, creates great nations. Great nations enable their people to improve their lives; the standard of living advances for everyone and people are truly happy because they are independent and successful. Welfare states enslave their people creating an addictive dependency; and the crushing taxes required to support welfare states demoralize its productive people. (The people who are unable to fend for themselves must be helped, of course, but preferably by charity; government should be the last resort here).
Great Nations Are the Creation Of Their People
Great nations are not the creation of their governments. They are the creation of their people. A great nation’s government must encourage its people to independently pursue their own happiness, and then give them the freedom to do it (i.e. “get out of the way”). To the extent people cede responsibilities to their government, government may be required to put some limits on freedoms and to enact the taxes required to pay for its activities. But these constraints should be the exception. Freedom should be the rule. Communist governments and other welfare states consistently fail because they make the exceptions to freedom the rule; they enslave their people and smother their inherent power.
There is a caveat however. The people of a great nation must be “personally responsible.” Personal responsibility goes beyond merely doing what the law requires. It means doing what you inherently know to be right. It means holding yourself to be as responsible to other people as you are to yourself. It requires you to develop and follow your moral compass. It is grounded in love, for others and yourself. Personal responsibility acts both inwardly (to yourself) and outwardly (to other people). At its highest level, it is doing the right thing, in the right way, every time.
remove personal responsibility and freedom can and will lead to chaos
When our nation was founded, our people were personally responsible in this way. There are always some exceptions, but personal responsibility characterized our hard working pioneers. Our Founding Fathers did not usurp the freedom of our people to pursue their own paths to happiness. And it worked: freedom, guided by personal responsibility, produced the highest standard of living ever known and the best and most powerful nation on earth.
But remove personal responsibility and freedom can and will lead to chaos. It may take a while, and authoritarian governments may intervene along the way, but the end result is always chaos. And this chaos inevitably brings on revolution, atrophy, hyper-inflation, or some other horrible condition equally as bad.
A simple example will illuminate this.
Assume a hypothetical country wisely gave its people the freedom to pursue their own happiness however they wished. Over time, these people invented cars and developed roads. The only government interventions were the minimum traffic controls necessary to maintain order on the roads. For a while, people drove their cars responsibly. Everything worked well, and everyone prospered. But then some of the people started to lose their sense of personal responsibility and drive cars that were not properly maintained, or drive in disobedience of the traffic regulations, or drive while intoxicated, or drive with seriously impaired eye sight, or drive while totally distracted by technology gadgets. And of course, accidents, injuries and deaths on the roads increased. In response, the country would have to impose an increasing number of regulations, each of which would further restrict driving freedom. If more and more people chose to drive in this irresponsible way, until the great majority of drivers were irresponsible, there would be utter chaos on the roads. And the government would be forced to take away all freedoms to drive. It might do this by excessive regulation of individual drivers, or even a total elimination of individual drivers or cars.
The Message Is Simple
Freedom without personal responsibility leads to chaos. And chaos invariably leads to the loss of freedom. Without freedom people and nations cannot prosper. (See “A Responsibility Dream” posted on this site on March 28, 2013). The freedom to obtain the American Dream must be enabled by the personal responsibility of those who dream the Dream.. You can’t have one without the other…Bill O’Neill