The philosophy of liberty - video

The following video should prove educational to many people who have been led down the wrong path about the purpose of government and its impact on liberty when misused.

In short, the assumption that someone else has any claim on your life is absurd.  In order to create wealth, people have to work.  That work consumes a portion of your life.  Life is a consumable resource.  Once your life is exhausted, you die.  If you use your youthful life to create wealth for your own retirement then it means you are not counting on someone else to save you later on.  Such use of life is considered acting responsibly.  In this case your wealth must be considered either as stored life or as expended life depending on how you want to look at it.  In either case it is a one way street.  You traded your life for some money.  Or, as Jim Morrison sang it,“trade in your hours for a handful of dimes....".

When other people try to force you to spend your money on their pet projects, they are trying to claim a portion of your stored life force.  They are trying to steal a portion of your life.  When someone does this we call it slavery.  Nobody has the right to enslave another person by any means or for any purpose.  No matter how civilized or emotion-wrapped the threat presents itself, it is still a threat against one's freedom.  People have the inalienable right to defend themselves against those who would enslave them, including the use of physical force if there is no other way to defend oneself from this threat. 

The concept of slavery is far from hypothetical even in our modern age.  There is a thriving slave trade in many places in this world, including right here in the USA.  Slaves are used for many purposes including the sex trade as well as forced labor in low income countries.  Slavery is not just something you read about in the history books, it is alive and well on many levels today.  If your children were taken by slavers and then forced into prostitution, what limits would you place upon them in trying to secure their own freedom?  I can't speak for everyone but in my mind there would be no limits on what I would condone them doing in order to achieve freedom.  That's how terrible slavery is.  We only get one life and for someone else to steal all or part of it from you whether by physical force or through sophistry, guile and threat of law makes little difference.

If slavers broke into your house and threatened to take you away and sell you into the slave trade you would be justified in using any means available to you in resistance of their immoral acts.  It is thus justified to protect oneself from slavery by degree using all reasonable methods available commensurate with the degree to which someone is trying to enslave you.  If they want to steal 100% of your work output (complete slavery) then you have the right and even the moral imperative to shoot to kill in order to avoid being completely enslaved by criminals.  But what if the slavery is not 100%?  What if slavers only demanded 50% of your work output or maybe only 20%?  A reasonable person would probably conclude that the resistance used be scaled down so that it was proportional to the threat. 

The only problem is the definition of what is reasonable to put up with when it comes to something immoral like slavery.  Some people might be content to endure 20% slavery but others might believe that any amount of slavery is too much.  History shows that 100% slavery is not the standard by which resistance by deadly force is warranted.  The founding fathers of the United States believed that the government of Great Britain was effectively enslaving them thus making moral and just the need for a bloody revolution.  It was certainly not 100% slavery which would have meant the theft of all the productive output of the people.  In fact it was not even 50% slavery.  People in the colonies did not live a standard of living that they would have had to suffer had Great Britain been stealing half their productive output.  Maybe it was as low as 30% slavery.  So history shows us that there is no hard and fast standard for how much slavery people should be forced to endure before they resort to resistance by the use of physical force.  This concept is actually the very essence of the Declaration of Independence of the United States which is backed by the constitution and the second amendment to the Constitution.  

When people try to use government to take your money from you in order to fund their pet projects they are really trying to use government to enslave you and to remove from you your right to spend your life force on improving your own living condition.  I don't care if the amount in question is a penny or a pound and in fact history shows that the demand for a penny always turns into a demand for a pound over time. 

It is shameful for people to try to enslave their fellow citizens like this, even if the slavery happens over time and by degree.  If some people want to support special causes then they need to use their own labor to earn money to support them instead of promising votes to politicians if they will only steal from the rest of the people and enslave them by degree on behalf of these "do gooders".  It is a dishonest and nefarious practice to enslave one man in order to provide for another and it is bad for the economy as a whole.  People who think they have the right to steal other people’s lives like this are not doing good in aggregate.  The bad done in enslaving others far outweighs any perceived good being done.