- Barry Goldwater, Conscience of a Consevative
The question at hand is how does freedom occur.Every action taken by a government only chips away at freedom. However for no government to exist would lead to anarchy, where factions of tyrants would take power and destroy freedom (even past Frances lack of) into a situation much like that of Somalia. Because of this, there is no known system of which total freedom can exist because to preserve freedom a government must exist.To best preserve freedom government must remain limited. Because each action government takes in essence removes freedom, its only actions should go towards preserving freedom. Such areas as national defense (less we want to come under rule of a foriegn aggressor), outlaw of murder (in my mind abortion fits here), larceny, and any other act in which results in or will highly lead to harming another person.
It has been customary of the left to point out that such beliefs are not in sink with compassion. The simple fact is that compassion never occurs when the giver is under coercion, rather results in larceny. The only true way to maintain freedom and compasion is for the private sector to be the vehicle of compasion. Often those of the left make the threat of starving children in the street if it weren't for the social programs we have. I would argue that if we had starving children in the street private charities that provide for them would receive much more donations, also these would be more cost effective. The other argument the left thrusts out is that of the starving homosexual. The claim is the primarly Christian charities would discriminate against them. If that may be the case than maybe instead of spending all their time trying to create more laws the various gay groups should help out those being neglected by ther other charities.
Government has many noble ventures that it can get into, and it seems there are many places that the government can spend money. I must caution all those who claim it's only a little bit, as one congressman said, " a couple million here, a few million there, and hell were talkin about real money". It all adds up, a little here and a little there and soon we have no freedom.