Upward! Brain Food for Individual Liberty – #1 The Government or the Market

By Richard Rowland

Ludwig von Mises once observed: “ The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution”

Pick up the Declaration of Independence and ask yourself: “What does it say about political choices?” Well, it sure does not say left or right, liberal or conservative, socialist or capitalist or any other common terms dreamed up by pundits out to confuse the public. It allows for only two choices and it makes perfectly plain the choice. The people, as individuals, are given autonomy to reach UP toward creativity, personal improvement, and accountability to include reward for earned success. The other choice, specifically rejected, was forcing us DOWN into the pit of bigger, more intrusive, more demanding government. Either we each govern ourselves as well as the government or the government is supreme and dictatorial, making us serfs. Back to Mises: the market is simply a vast number of people, free to choose and doing so. Mises is echoing those 56 signers of the Declaration.

Accordingly, each of us, as We the People, need to look at every proposed or actual government action: if it leads to a bigger, more powerful government it is leading DOWNWARD. If it opens the way toward individual freedom and choice, it is an UPWARD act and deserves support. President Calvin Coolidge said “ If we cannot govern ourselves, if we cannot observe the law, nothing remains but to have some one else govern us, to have the law enforced against us, and to step down from the honorable abiding place of freedom to the ignominious abode of servitude.”

Let’s give Steve Forbes the last words. “There is something fundamentally unfair about a government that takes away so much of people’s money, power and personal control while telling them that life will be better as a result” UPWARD! Be specifically intolerant of DOWNWARD.