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Common Sense: The Price of Freedom

One feature of government bureaucracy which is most unsettling is that its constituents tend to disassociate its agents' wrongdoings from the failings of the whole system. 

Constituents, whether voters or members of a government agency, tend to assign higher and more abstract authority to the office than it has historically warranted. 

Much as we referred to the "operational Air Force" during my days at the United States Air Force Academy, we invoke a nebulous and impossibly-abstract notion of what the institution represents, while its beginnings are rooted in rousing controversy and its actions have been hopelessly mired in dire disappointment. 

As the institution endures, it begins to assume a life of its own, independent of its history and the flesh and blood which has comprised it. 

Constituents everywhere either tolerate the inadequacy, out of confusion, disinterest or capitulation, or they create excuses for it by blaming the controller instead of the system itself, or by wishfully fantasizing over its ideal state, its traditions or how great it could be. 

The lion's share of these phenomena is relatable to not only agencies within the U.S. government, but the total constitutional republic as a whole. 

Even those who represent the vestigial threads to this republic's dying traditions have been subjected to the delusion that their country remains free and independent. 

They refuse to face the music because they reject the idea of living in that reality: a place where the United States of America has yet to officially renounce its relationship with capitalism and freedom. 

Until that day when the government formally declares itself the United Socialist States of America, there will be stubborn men and women who wave their flags on the fourth of July and who confuse the greatness of this country and its history with its government. 

Throughout the lifetime of the United States of America, it has never been the government which has rendered it great. 

On the contrary, it is precisely its very absence which rendered it so, which appealed to so many who voyaged over to these lands for the hope of freedom, not free stuff. 

Until we wield our collective powers as citizens and declare our intolerance for further encroachment, we will be left to the devices of demagogues willing to sell anything and everything to win their elections. 

And if we fail to rise to the occasion to put a stop to it, they will have every capacity to make that happen. 

A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is a government powerful enough to take everything you have. 

Freedom is the commodity whose value is most overlooked until it is absolutely required. 

Though you won’t actually see its disappearance, you’ll feel it; it is at this point when the value of freedom is most palpable, and the mighty toil to reacquire it most worthy of remembrance. 

As illustrated throughout history, the greatest threat to liberty is the definition of its terms. 

We shall resist any temptation to sell it for petty conveniences of comfort or security. 

Ultimately, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance and the capacity to fail. 

And it today appears more urgent than ever, when the United States of America has embarked upon wars of aggression and entangling alliances across the many nations of the world; when nonviolent criminals and nonviolent crimes have yielded incarceration of more than twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population; when greater than forty percent of gross domestic product has gone to government spending; when the United States dollar has lost more than 98 percent of its value over the last century; when militarized policemen line our streets, invade our homes, murder our loved ones, or arrest them on unreasonable suspicion or fabricated charges; when personal liberties are ubiquitously violated, and critical government records are withheld from public use, on the purported basis of national security; when the democratic voice has been compromised by a structure which buys votes and doles out favors; when secret agencies within government have covertly and not-so-covertly assassinated leaders and heads of state, both domestically and abroad; when those secret agencies have engaged in repeated cover-ups, false flags and operations against their own citizenry; when the ubiquitous clamps of government have been wrought so tightly that its citizens are assumed guilty until proven innocent; when a nation of takers condemns those who have built themselves through voluntary exchange; when that nation has become one of men irreverent toward their own laws; when that infectious government flu has systematically suppressed the spirit of liberty and those who wish to preserve it, rendering truth treason in the empire of lies

The time for freedom is upon us. 

As the original Declaration of Independence portends, “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” 

It is manifestly clear that this time has arrived, where the brave take it upon themselves to restore the land of the free. 

Government never learns. 

Only people do. It is ours to take. 

As Jefferson proclaimed, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” 

Let your position be known or let it be squashed by those who will seize every inch. 

And here, without anger or resentment, I bid you farewell.

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