America - the land of the free they call it.
Yet when examined by our own eyes, there’s nothing free about it. Every corner for the citizen is managed. The stockpile of rules and regulations are strangling. Nearly everything the average American does is either illegal or one misstep away from it.
We test our cars for emissions, insure them against accident, pay our tolls, license our cars, our businesses, our hunting, our fishing, our mattresses, our side hustles, our pets, everything, the government insists, needs oversight.
We pay our state taxes, our sales taxes, our taxes to the federal government, taxes on our clothing, our food, our gas, our imports, our medicine.
Our businesses get subjected to inspections, and inspectors. Bureaucrats and busybodies have a say in how we operate. Margins on products are subjected to limitations and threat of fine or vilified by politicians.
The message is clear - we will be managed because we are an impediment to the state’s objectives. We are the problem. We cause the damage to the environment, we are the virus that has to be eliminated.
But there’s also a shadow world.
One that isn’t subjected to the rules. If you meet the objectives of the state, there are no impediments to you. You can escape the HOA life because you complete their objectives. You help the powerful get their payoffs and their permanent implantation into power.
You can be a defense contractor or an online retailer with a massive cloud service that really generates your profit from all of the government contracts and you can escape paying taxes and skirt the regulations, because you help them meet their goals.
You can squash your competition with the aid of the powerful and political.
You can skip the inspections, lawyer up against the rules as written and make up your own that makes your business thrive and your competition choke.
You can rig the system so that your products aren’t subjected to testing and are immune from harm or lawsuit.
You can grease the path so that no one but you can win.
We live in two worlds - one where we play by the rules in the contract as written, and one where the rules are for their benefit and gain.
These two worlds are designed for demoralization and destruction of the spirt of humanity.
The standards are different for different players - and they will use whatever they need to make sure that we are defeated…not just in pragmatism but in our spirits. The objective is for our admittance, in a 1984 Winstonian type defeat, that we belong to the government and we are the ones that are truly the problem.
The idea of a life of liberty and freedom is in name only. Democracy means voting for them…always. Democracy means living for them….always. Democracy means war and theft and burden. Democracy means that liberty is dangerous, that innovation is for the Defense department, and money and power. Democracy means lethargy and lack of aspiration. Democracy is sickness.
Democracy is industry.
Democracy is silence.
The battle now is not between left and right and Democrats and Republicans, it’s about two ways - a free life or a managed life.
I want liberty
I want innovation to benefit the citizen
I want a government that lives by the contracts with its citizens, not the contracts with the well connected.
I want a government that is small enough to be obedient to the people, not one so large that the only option is obedience by the people.
I want a government that honors its citizens innovative spirits, not one that does all it can to make sure that aspiration and innovation are dead on arrival or stolen by the empires cronies.
I want a government that is interested in the health of its people, not one that makes sure that sickness is the backbone of their mechanisms of control.
I want a government that allows the market to solve the problems, not one that creates the unsolvable problems so that their people of choice always win.
I want a government that is good, and looks out for the good of its environment and people and not one that penalizes its people for being alive.
This is our chance to undo the world that was made under our noses while they kept us busy chasing devaluing dollars and omnipresent rules. We complied with each new poke and prod and nasty bureaucratic letter like trained animals. We obeyed the IRS and their gunpoints and the world we never would have dreamed of as a liberty loving country was made by fear and compliance.
No society that has ever been overcome by totalitarianism, either in revolution or abdication, has voted its way out of that terror - its an attitude of the citizen that has to be awakened. We are in charge of breaking apart the self imposed prison and the two world landscape we have obeyed our way into.
Speak out
Get radical about the role of the government and the governed.
Get free
Get liberty.
Essay 73 - Two Systems