We had a horrific attack on innocent people in Las Vegas on Monday and the politicians are running the usual script again. They want to crack down on our right to bear arms under the false tag name “Gun Control”. This is not the first time they do that, and won’t be the last. Every time we have a shooting or a terrorist attack we always hear the politicians giving us the false choice between Liberty and Security. We have fallen for this so many times over the decades, we accepted reduction in our liberties in exchange for false promises:
- We accepted restrictions on our gun rights in 1934, 1937, 1968, 1986. None of these laws made any improvements in any crime statistics.
- We let our government spy on us and harass us in airports in the name of security but no-one every question the effectiveness of these measures and what they are doing to our character as a supposedly free country.
- We accepted fiat paper money instead of gold backed currency in exchange for promise of a central bank that would prevent panics but since the establishment of the Federal Reserves our recessions became more frequent and inflation became the norm. The federal reserve has created money out of thin air and used it to buy government bonds to finance welfare and warfare spending that doesn’t benefit the country in the long run.
- We accepted government interference in our retirement planning in the form of social security and now we have a broken system that will go bankrupt soon and cannot support retirement life for anyone.
- We accepted government interference in our healthcare system in the form of regulations and mandates culminated in the disaster called Obamacare. In exchange we got high prices, denied coverage, shortages of doctors and bad health outcomes.
There are many examples in many fields of us letting the government take away some of our liberties in exchange for false promises. I am glad that our gun rights activists have successfully stopped the federal government from taking away more of our rights and expanded those rights in most states, but I wish we can do the same for all other areas of our life.