 I was having a conversation the other day with one of my close liberal friends. We were discussing resumes of two of the current presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney. My point was to show that Romney had the better of the two resumes. That his experience in successfully running companies, turning around the Salt Lake Olympics, and reducing Massachusetts's deficit by 3 billion dollars without raising taxes trumpeted Clinton's resume. Her response was there is a fundamental difference in running a company and running the government. Companies are made to make capital. While government's purpose [and here is the key point] is to help and support the people.
<!--more-->This is where my friend and I differ on the role of the government. She believes it is something more akin to a non-profit charitable organization whose charge it is to ensure that everyone within its scope of influence has a good life. That the people are protected not only from those who wish to do them harm but in a very real sense protected even from themselves. I on the other hand believe the role of government is to create an environment where the people have the opportunity to be free to run and in some cases ruin their own lives.
In reading and studying the Founding Fathers it was their intention to create a government that did not take care of its people, a la a mother, but rather to create a government that protected the inalienable rights of its citizens. They worked to establish a government that allowed people to make their own choices, to choose their own destiny, to run their lives in the manner that they saw fit, as long as those choices did not infringe upon the same natural rights of others.
Thomas Paine famously once said “That government is best which governs least.” It is not the role of government to be involved in every aspect of our lives. It is the role of government to govern only to the extent that they protect my right to live my life according to my own designs [as long as my actions do not infringe upon the natural freedoms of my neighbor], even if that means that I make poor and unwise decisions. I want to live in a country where I can choose my own destiny, make my own decisions on where to invest my money, and have the freedom to express myself. I do not want to live in a country where those choices are made for me by people who walk gilded halls in a distant city.
My liberal friend believes that Hillary Clinton is on the right track when she states that providing universal health care is a moral principle [for my view on this see this post]. Even if that means garnishing the wages of those who choose to forgo government run health care. According to Clinton the government has the right to "automatically enroll people, and you will then say you've got to be part of this." I understand where Clinton is comping from. She is trying to help and support those people who have a difficult time helping themselves. On the surface this appears charitable, but beneath there is great danger. First is you begin to encroach upon my natural rights to live my life according to my designs. The question is where does this stop? Second it puts a great amount of power in the hands of a few. One of the great insights of the Founding Fathers was the importance of diluting power. As a representative to the U.S. Congress Gerald Ford once said "If the government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have."
In closing I think Barry Goldwater said it best "Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism."
While I do not think Hillary Clinton is looking to become a despot she is unwittingly leading our country towards that path. The more government is involved in out lives, the more they provide, the more the protect us from ourselves the closer we come to that type of country our Founding Fathers so valiantly gave their whole lives to defeat.
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