POLITICS: On the side of liberty
Along with a hundred other citizens, special guests, Bob Nonini, Vito Barbieri, Phil Hart and Steve Vick, I was much encouraged having attended the Idaho Freedom Foundation meeting last week at the Red Lion Inn in Post Falls. While there, I met an engaging young man named Bruce. He shared a website with me, mises.org. On this site I found an essay by Frenchman Frederic Bastiat from 1850. This essay could have been written today. Bastiat's essay captures the tone of concern for our country, which most in attendance last night and many in our country share. I will let Bastiat speak for himself.
"It is not true that the mission of the law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our will, our education, our sentiments, our exchanges, our gifts, our enjoyments. Its mission is to prevent the rights of one from interfering with those of another, in any one of these things. Law, because it has force for its necessary sanction, can only have the domain of force, which is justice.
Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds government and society. And so, every time we object to a thing being done by government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the state - then we are against education altogether. We object to a state religion - then we would have no religion at all. We object to an equality which is brought about by the state then we are against equality, etc., etc. They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the state.
How is it that the strange idea of making the law produce what it does not contain - prosperity, in a positive sense, wealth, science, religion - should ever have gained ground in the political world? The modern politicians, particularly those of the Socialist school, found their different theories upon one common hypothesis; and surely a more strange, a more presumptuous notion, could never have entered a human brain.
They divide mankind into two parts. Men in general, except one, form the first; the politician himself forms the second, which is by far the most important.
Bastiat concludes his penetrating analysis with this:
"The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, and their chains, and their hooks, and their pincers! Away with their artificial methods! Away with their social laboratories, their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their state religions, their inflationary or monopolizing banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their moralizations and their equalization by taxation! And now, after having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun - reject all systems, and try of liberty - liberty, which is an act of faith in God and in His work."
God, help us.
BOB HOLLIDAY
Post Falls