The real cost of freedom

We have long, as a people, sought freedom. We've turned our faces to the sky, looking out into the stars, and wondered where it lies, what it means. I've discussed in earlier documents what freedom is, what it looks like, how it's found and how that system came to evolve. This time, however, your poor and total idiot must discuss something far more dark, its cost. Like all things, freedom has its own costs. Many are aware of the cost of blood and heartache, but there are deeper costs, costs far more intrinsic to the makeup of freedom itself.

We all hold beliefs, and many hold these beliefs as sacred and as truth, bound by the wisdom of the ages. Not all agree on these beliefs, not all choose to follow the same Gods or guidelines, and thus, the separation of the power of the state from those powers of belief was established, to allow the power of conversation, rather than the power of government, to shape the right of conscience.


The greatest cost of freedom, of its creation, its maintenance, and safekeeping lies in these beliefs, and in our sacrifice of our power over our fellow man to force them to our beliefs. If we cannot force them by conversation, we certainly must not bring down the impersonal power of the government to bend their minds to our will.

Equally, we have costs in self-interest. If we cannot thrive by our own industry, and those working for us, we cannot bend the government to grant us advantage, or others penalties for doing things differently. We cannot support business upon the altar of the economy by government action. Monopoly has ever been the enemy of freedom, and it exists only so long as the government has the power to influence some for their benefit, and others for their penalty. It grinds our liberty and our ability for self-determination, and capability for our increase and profit under its bootheel.

We have costs in our abilities to levy weights upon others for their misdeeds. While we as a society have the authority to punish, such punishments must be laid out in the beginning, and enforceable under the law. We cannot lay separate law against one class of offender once the state's interest in incarceration is done, and a separate law for the rest of society. In this direction lies the loss of all rights for all persons.

We have costs in our feelings of security, for in a free society, there is no security save that which one may provide for himself in his rights of self-defense. No policeman may be everywhere at once, and still maintain that freedom. We have no right to be protected, nor are the police required to give that protection. All we may do is attempt to maintain the powers of an individual to protect himself, and those around him.

We have costs in our dominance over others. Whilst power seems a worthy end, power over others is the enemy to freedom. We have no more right to dominate the wills and properties of others, than for them to dominate our own will and volition.

We sacrifice numerous things on the altar of freedom, our ability for actions against the rights of others, our ability to target the law against others for our own benefit, our ability to steal via the powers of government, be that property the property in rights, or real or personal property. We sacrifice the power to enforce our definitions of marriage, of religion, of our beliefs and our faiths, or lack thereof, upon others.

We turn away from codified laws of the malum prohibitum, to the malum in se.. those things which are done, no matter whom they are done to, that are wrong in and of themselves, and go no further.

We must enforce the laws upon our president, and our congress, equally to our people and our courts. No exemptions may be made, no codicils, loopholes, or immunities. All must bear the burden of the law, and none are above it. The laws must be made for general benefit, not for the benefit of the few, and they must affect all equally.

This is true both at the state, and federal level, and at the county and city levels as well, as they are extensions of, and created by the state power.

And that is the greatest cost of all... you must give up power over your neighbor, and deal with your things in the way you see fit, and allow him to do as he sees fit, so long as it harms no one.

We must give up the belief that being offended is a wrong in and of itself, and abandon the belief that we have the right to determine the beliefs of others.

If we mean to be free, we must be also free to determine our own future, and leave others to determine theirs. Denial of that right to determine the future is a crime, in and of itself. It is malum in se.

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