20090315 Death of Freedom

Liberty always has a way of dying when no one is watching. It could not have died during the administration of George Bush or when there was a Republican Senate, not because there was no one in office who wanted power, but because there was vigilance on the part of civil libertarians who feared encroachment on their freedoms. In the last two months, it has begun to whither not due to late night back room deal cutting, but because there was a public outcry for it to be put down. Liberty was given two crippling wounds recently to the delight of a populace who did not recognize what they were applauding.

When the life choices of the “Octo-mom” came to light the tabloids and the public went through a brief period of confusion followed by outrage. A woman with no job or visible means of support and who was mother to six infants and toddlers born from artificial insemination and then delivered eight more babies which had been fertilized in a lab and implanted in her uterus. During the midst of the greatest destruction of personal wealth in a generation, a populous which feared for its jobs and was sweating monthly payments suddenly realized it was going to be footing the bill for fourteen children who were brought into the world only to boost one woman’s feeling of worth. The calls came in: she has an addiction to being pregnant, she suffers from mental illness, she is trying to make up for a lonely and empty childhood by crippling the egos of fourteen babies.

Suddenly it was acceptable to state that she had no right to do what she had done. Everyone, both liberal and conservative, seemed to feel very safe agreeing that she was wrong, that the doctor who performed the procedure had failed in his oath to “do no harm”, and that government had the right and the duty to take the children away from her.

Imagine if, just a few short months ago, someone had spoken up and suggested that the government had a right to limit the number of children a person on public support could have? It was a rock solid part of liberal belief that society had no right to limit the life choices of individuals who continually made bad choices. Once a person goes on public support, their life choices are severely limited but we, the belief has always gone, should not regulate behavior. This has often been extended to not make suggestions about how best to get themselves into a more self reliant. This party explains how an underclass has developed which goes from generation to generation, each having less of a clue of how to raise themselves up than the last one had.

Our response to “Octo-mom” suggests that times have changed. Now, when we the society know better, we have a right to at least criticize. But “Octo-mom is not the only focus of our new involvement. Now, our politicians have given themselves the right to manage the behavior of bankers. Even if a banker uses his own money to remodel his office, we have seen that he can be criticized if his bank later takes a government loan. Even when a bank’s managers are taken into a back office and forced to take bailout money they do not want so others will be more inclined to follow along are subject to the Senate’s rage when they entertain clients and attempt to grow their business. Congressmen who have never taken a business course have assigned themselves the power to know who to run multi-billion dollar corporations.

As a conservative, I would like to say that this new trend is the doing of Democrats, but the back room arm twisting of bankers started under George Bush’s tenure and illustrates why George Bush was never a conservative. The trend has been ramped up incrementally by such figures as Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Christopher Todd and John Kerry.

There is a form of socialism found in the history and economic textbooks which allows for private ownership with government management. It was the guiding economic policy in Spain, Italy and German for several decades of the twentieth century. It is called Fascism. Each time it was tried, it led to a suppression of the poorest citizens while a ruling elite rose under the hand of a dictator. It does not matter if the county’s top leader is George Bush, Barack Obama or Susan Sarandon, we do not need a dictator; we do not need a ruling elite and we do not need the micro managing of a strong central government.