-Caveat Lector-
>From http://www.backwoodshome.com/columns/wolfe0107.html
}}}>Begin
Living the outlaw life:
To hell with freedom!
By Claire Wolfe
Editor-at-Large, Backwoods Home Magazine
So here I sit, facing a tough Duffy deadline. Its my job in life (and in this
article) to
give readers practical ideas for how to live free. Im supposed to engage enthusiasm.
Concoct creative concepts. Inspire glorious disobedience to all thats stultifying,
bureaucratically burdensome, and contrary to the way good, contrary Americans like
to live.
But you know what? I dont wanna.
To heck with it. Freedoms too hard, as readers have been informing me for years.
And hey, 285 million Americans cant be wrong. So Im going to go write romance
novels instead. TV scripts. Yeah, thats the thing, sitcom episodes.
I mean, look at it. Whats the big deal about freedom that makes it worth all that
effort?
Freedoms a nice luxury, of course. If you were free you wouldnt be a dependent, a
collaborator, or a victim of an aggressive government. Youd be able to live and think
as you saw fit, as long as you respected others right to do the same. Your life
wouldnt be dedicated to compliance (or else) with any old random order written by
any old random bureaucrat. Youd support the causes and people you value, not the
causes and people some interest group wants to force you to support with your
money, your labor, and your life.
Wow, what a rush that would be.
But you cant do that, these days. They wont let you. So why even try? And look at all
the reasons not to try!
Freedom is dull. If you want to be free you have to understand the principles of
freedom. You have to read boring old documents like the Declaration of
Independence, The Federalist Papers, The Anti-Federalist Papers, Common Sense,
and intellectual tomes that are thick with old-fashioned words by Locke,
Montesquiue, de Tocqueville, Bastiat, von Mises, and people like that.
If you dont, then your grasp of freedom will never go beyond some insubstantial
thing like freedom is whatever feels good or worse, freedom is what the politicians
tell us we have in America. And thatll get you exactly nowhere.
So you gotta study. But face it, none of those dead philosophers could hold a candle
to Danielle Steele when it comes to prose. Du-u-u-l!
Youve also got to keep track of laws and regulations even if (maybe especially if)
you dont plan to obey them. Youve got to know whats coming at you so you can
fight it or dodge it.
That means you have to spot in advance when health-care privacy regulations are
actually going to create a giant federal database with information about your
hemorrhoids, nose-picking, flatulence, vaginal infections, depression, or drug abuse.
Or when some teeny clause in some moderate, common-sense bill to close the
gun-show loophole might end up creating a federal record of everybody who ever
even sets foot in the door of a gun show.
Even when some politician hits your particular happy buttons like curbing illegal
immigration (Yeah, we gotta stop those people from stealing good American jobs!)
youve got to be on the lookout for the inevitable consequences. Consequences like
national ID cards, asset forfeiture, random checkpoints, and pilot programs to keep
you, Mr. or Ms. Whole-Wheat America -- not just those brown-skinned guys -- from
getting a job without prior federal permission. Politicians bury that stuff deep, deep,
deep -- way down where the friendly news reporters dont look. (And why should you
go to all the bother of finding out, if people who are paid to keep watch on
government dont? If you thought reading Tocqueville was dull, wait till you read
Feinstein, Hatch, Schumer, McCain, or Feingold.)
In your private life, freedom means taking full responsibility for your own actions. I
hardly need to mention what a drag that is. In a free country youd have to pay the
consequences of your screwups unless someone voluntarily bailed you out. (And I
mean voluntarily in the old sense, not in the NewSpeak sense of Do it voluntarily or
well hurt you.)
That is just not the modern American way. Playing Tomb Raider is far more
entertaining.
Freedom is risky, besides. And the risks are everywhere. Try exercising even itty-
bitty freedoms and the jackboots can come marching right into your most private life.
If you think its more dangerous than helpful to vaccinate your children, the
government might just take your kids away. They certainly wont let them into school
(schools you paid for with your tax dollars).
Drive within a thousand feet of a school with a gun in your vehicle and you can get
five years in the federal lockup even if you dont know the school or the gun is
there. (And if great champions of liberty like the NRA, G.W. Bush, and John Ashcroft
actually want the feds to crack down harder on that kind of gun crime, well, maybe
were just wrong to get so upset about it. Maybe, like our congressmen keep telling
us, we
