It's an odd thing as a talk show host to hear callers openly and unapologetically assert that losing one's freedom is no big deal.
I'm not a libertarian (I don't smoke pot), but I've always believed that liberty is a fundamental good--like prosperity, justice and the ability to pick up hot women. We place limits on liberty, of course--speed limits and the like--but I always thought that Americans did so reluctantly. I thought we accepted limits on our freedom as a necessary evil in order to make our large, pluralistic society work.
It looks like I was wrong. Every day I hear people all but begging the government to get rid of individual liberty and its unavoidable side effect, individual responsibility. The America where people were largely free to do as they pleased and to accept the consequences of their actions is being replaced with an America where people are waiting to be told what to do in order to avoid any possible risk of a bad outcome.
Peter Robinson has a great-but-depressing piece in Forbes on this subject:
The president-elect has also proposed refundable tax credits that represent direct cash grants from the federal government. As Daniel Henninger has noted, the Obama plan would "place some 48% of Americans ... out of the income tax system."
This would fundamentally alter the nature of citizenship itself. Almost half of all Americans would, in effect, have been made the recipients of a vast new entitlement. As that proportion grows, the nation would approach a tipping point.
All that the nation's founders understood two centuries ago about the imperative of limited government, all that we learned from the long struggle between collectivism and free markets during our own time--all this could soon simply evanesce.
We are being asked to unlearn what we know, to surrender the virtues that can only be acquired in conditions of freedom, and to become a lesser people than we are. The land of the free and the home of the brave could soon be transformed into the land of the dependent and the home of the infantilized. (emphasis added)
People who can't be expected to pay their own house payments or be responsible for their own medical care or decide whether or not to smoke or wear a seat belt--these are "lesser people." And lesser people create a lesser nation. And that has ramifications around the world, as Peter Hitchens noted in the London Guardian:
The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.
Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.
These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.
They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?
America is choosing to go from the "last best hope on Earth" to "just another affluent nation unwilling to bear any burden for liberty." When the call comes to defend democracy at 3am, President Obama will just let it ring. We're not that kind of America anymore.
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