Guest Column: Where did all your freedom go?

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on March 19, 2018.

Imagine a time when you are the only person around and you are free to do whatever you want. You can go naked, weather permitting, and you can shout, say and do anything you want — complete freedom.

OK, maybe complete freedom would not be ideal. You might want a spouse to love and communicate with and to share your life. The problem is, that comes with a price. Having a second person will require some sacrifice to your freedom as you accommodate the whims and wishes of another person.

As time passes, we added more relations, neighbours and acquaintances to our lives. These additional people provided more options. We had people to help us build roads and bridges to help us expand our freedom and our ability to move about. There was a cost to our freedom in that we had to consider more people in our lives and we had to devote time from our lives to provide goods or services to compensate these people who were building the infrastructure that we would get to use. This was an obligation and another cost to our freedom.

It started to get complicated and now we needed to have more means of compensation for those who provided services and we need someone to help us organize our public services. So we determined that we need government to set the rules and enforce them. So a few people decide what is good for us and every new law imposes a cost and some limit to our freedom.

In schools, someone must decide what is appropriate to wear and what behaviours are acceptable and every rule restricts someone’s freedom or custom. Someone decides that carbon is bad so I must pay more for my fuel consumption.

We invite people to our country and allow them to adjust the rules of our society and make changes to the way we live. This also imposes additional limits to our freedoms. Since some provinces refuse to harvest the resources that are available to them, I must pay more taxes to subsidize their shortcomings. This is another limit to my freedom.

Some people drive badly and put themselves at greater risk for an accident so I must pay for additional law enforcement and higher insurance premiums to compensate for them. This has more impact on my ability to save and puts another obligation on my freedom.

Then there are the terrorists that threaten our societies, so we are encouraged give up our privacy in order to allow law enforcement to more easily detect these people in our midst.

The elite class and those who run our government seek to ensure their survival at our expense. They increase immigration, taxes and programs to ensure that the working class stays dependant. They will try to provide medical services, drug plans, child care and on and on. Each one of these will require additional money, rules and restrictions that put further limits on our freedom. Taxes and debt will go up ensuring that the individual will find it more difficult to succeed on their own but ensuring that government size and control continues to grow.

Our left wing governments knowingly enable us like dependent children. In our schools they educate us to submit to the will of the elite and their rules. Every time we have a problem or an issue, they want to throw money at it and fix it for us so we do not have to deal with it ourselves. In the process, they ensure that future generations will follow in our footsteps and take the easy way out. Every time another government program goes into effect, a little more of our freedom disappears.

History has shown us that as this attitude progresses, governments become more powerful and citizens become more dependant and weak. There are a multitude of examples in the world where left wing governments turn to dictatorship, communism, suppression, and total dependency of entire populations.

Where did your freedom go? We gave it away one little piece at a time. That is how we end up looking like the 40-year-old guy still at home living in his parent’s basement playing video games and living on just what his parents give him. There is no point putting in further effort only to pay the bills of past generations and ensuring the elite continue to prosper. This will only change when we realize that we have been duped and then rise up and take our freedom back.

Paul McLennan moved to Alberta more than 20 years ago as a member of the RCMP. He remained in Alberta after retirement in 2002, taught driving part time and settled in Medicine Hat in 2011.

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