The Falling and Confiscation of Liberty

To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical. – Thomas Jefferson

The individual mandate is forcing individuals into commerce, or using money in ways that they might not choose. It certainly is forcing the Catholic Church to fund birth control, even though their beliefs do not sanction such behavior.

I'm not interested in this post primiarily about birth control, Obamacare, or beliefs per se. I am only interested in how our government has become one that doesn't support and value liberty, as it did in our Founder's Day. Why is this?

The rage today is "systems think", though our Founders were setting up a system of government, they did not want the system to over-ride individual liberty, thus the Bill of Rights. Government was to limit itself with proper checks and balances.

Today, government wants to intrude into our pocketbooks to create safety nets for those that haven't taken advantage of the opportunities that are before them in this nation. These are those that know how to use the system to their advantage and some of them do so without conscience. Criminal minds can easily use systems, because the system is so reliable. People in systems thinking are labelled to fulfill a role in the system that ends up determining and controlling human beings because of "outcomes". This is what the Founders understood as tyranny, because government or another had not right to interfere with the right to "own my own life". Owning one's own life or self-government was what liberty was about!.

The Constitution was what protected the citizen, but, without those in power honoring Constitutional protections and upholding "the rule of law", we have an undermining of our nation-state and citizen's rights for a "higher end" of "human rights". What is wrong with human rights? Human rights is a "collective identification". And collectivism labels to systemize and control, or determine, or experiment. These are not the values that our Founders had, as to government.

Collective identifications undermine individual intiative, incentive and outcomes, because people are labelled by race/ethnicity, gender, or religious affliation. When individuals are labelled, there is a depersonalization that makes for an undercutting of individual rights according to our Constitutional protections. "Humankind" has rights above and beyond specific individuals, society has a right over and above individuals and government has a right over and above individuals. This was known as tyranny by our Founding Fathers.

I am concerned about where we are headed because elites in the Academy have bought into "collective" or "group thinking", because humans are social beings, like any other animal. The question I have is do animals have the reasoning capacity that man does? Doesn't that make man different? If so, is man to be treated as "just another animal"?