Liberty people versus slavery people

By Tim Dunkin

It is becoming increasingly obvious to all, I believe, that there is a chasm in American society that is only getting wider. However, most people don't seem to really grasp what this division is about. Some think it is generational – the old versus the young. Others think it is racial, or based on income or other economic considerations. There are some who would say that the rift is political – Republicans versus Democrats, or even "independents" and third parties versus "the major parties." While each of these divisions may be affected to a greater or lesser degree by the real rift, these in and of themselves are not it. Really, the stark distinction that is increasingly being felt in our society, our political and cultural systems, is that which exists between those who generally want to be able to live their own lives in peace with as little interference from others (especially the government) as possible, and those who generally want greater and greater intrusion into their own lives and the lives of others, for various reasons.

This division is between what I call "liberty people" and "slavery people."

I believe that once we understand this simple division, much of what we see going on in the political world around us will start to make sense, it will "snap into place." The liberty people are the ones who aren't really interested in regulating or coercing other people to do what they want them to, when these others aren't hurting someone else. Liberty people think we all should pretty much mind our business and leave private matters private, instead of putting them into the public domain and subjecting them to government interference. On the other hand, slavery people are the opposite – they want to invade your privacy, impose their agendas onto your lives, and control your actions and thoughts as much as possible.

For example, one of the most pervasive areas of disagreement between liberty people and slavery people is that of whether, and with how much, we ought to subsidize our fellow citizens who could work and earn for themselves. There is a tremendous legion of Americans who believe that other Americans have a duty to give them free things – a monthly check, free housing, free health care, free child care, and what have you. This Free Stuff Army (FSA) dutifully votes for whichever politician promises them the most goodies at someone else's expense. However, supplying the funding to satisfy this ever-increasing demand of the lazy and incompetent means that somebody – the productive people of the nation – will have to have more and more of their earned wealth confiscate by the police powers of the state. This means that force, or the threat of it, must be applied to them to coerce them into giving up what is theirs so that it can be given to someone else who didn't earn it and doesn't deserve it.

This, naturally, can only serve to expand the scope and power of the government into peoples' lives. It expands against the productive class because more and more coercive apparatus is needed to confiscate and redistribute their wealth. It also expands against the slavery people, however, because he who takes the king's gold plays by the king's rules. The slavery people find their own lives ever more minutely regulated and policed as they abscond from their own responsibilies and yield the risks of adult living – having to buy your own house, having to earn your own paycheck, having to scrimp and save so you can afford your own health insurance, etc. – to the domain of the government. The slavery people are "free" from the burden of having to be responsible for themselves, but at the price of being unable to live their own lives as they see fit.

The productive people who subsidize this welfare state are typically liberty people. They don't see why they are expected to support those who can't be bothered to support themselves. They resent the intrusion of the tax-grabbing apparatus of the state into their own ability to support themselves and their families. Liberty people would rather people be forced to sink or swim, to take responsibility for themselves instead of childishly farming off life's risks onto other people. Liberty people are themselves willing to live with these risks and leave the government out of the equation when it comes to providing for their own needs and wants.

Let's look at another area where liberty people and slavery people – security versus liberty. To use one recent example, liberty people don't want their own government spying on them, logging their telephone conversations, tracking their internet use, keeping tabs on their banking and credit care transactions, and storing all this metadata so that it can be used to track, predict, and harass them later on. In short, liberty people don't think the NSA and other government agencies ought to be treating all American citizens as if we were criminals or potential terrorists – which is essentially what the NSA and the other alphabet agencies are doing when they collect and track all these data. Liberty people especially don't like it when this is done without their knowledge and without regard for the constitutional requirements imposed by the 4th amendment. The revelation of NSA domestic intelligence gathering against our own people disturbs liberty people immensely. They wonder why it is considered "treason" for Edward Snowden to have informed us of this spying – especially when that use of the term "treason" seems to suggest that the ones using it think Snowden gave this knowledge to the "enemy," which in this case would mean that the American people themselves – or at least those who squawk about "freedom" and "civil liberties" – are the enemy who needs to be monitored. Liberty people don't like the idea that their own government is treating them as de facto enemies of the state, like they were al-Qaeda or something.

At the same time, the NSA spying revelation has provided an opportunity for the slavery people to show us what they're made of. This is one particular instance where the liberty vs. slavery divide does not line up with the typical Right vs. Left division we generally tend to think of. Indeed, there have been many law and order "conservatives" who have joined the ruling class portion of the slavery people in condemning the revelation of NSA spying. Typically, these folks will focus on Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald themselves (since both of them are lefties, and thus present an acceptable target), while tending to skirt around the issue of the spying that these men exposed. However, Snowden and Greenwald are not really the issue – focusing on them is a distraction by slavery people designed to take our eyes off the liberty issue of unconstitutional domestic surveillance of innocent American citizens. And ultimately, when you get right down to it, there are a lot of so-called "conservatives" who are every bit as pro-government intrusion as are Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein. These folks are slavery people.

Then there's the issue of self-defense and the right to keep and bear arms. Liberty people think that the people are the source of governmental power – we grant this power to the government through our own dispensation – and therefore the people themselves ought to possess the preponderant share of the power to use force. Liberty people view it as perfectly acceptable to own guns to defend themselves, their families, their homes, and the innocent people in their communities and nation in general. We also understand that this defense might at times include defending ourselves against overbearing and overreaching government. To be armed is to be free; a citizen has the right to own and carry weapons, an enserfed subject is disarmed and at the mercy of others.

Slavery people, on the other hand, think guns are "scary and bad." They often manifest a childish, immature fear of firearms, viewing the firearm as a moral object in and of itself that acts on its own initiative, rather than as a tool that can be used for good or for evil, according to the inclination of the heart that is wielding it. Slavery people think that the government should have a monopoly on the use of force, and that it would always and at all times be criminal to forcefully oppose an act of government, no matter how unconstitutional, unjust, violent, oppressive, or destructive to the people of the nation. Slavery people will often express sentiments such as "why does anyone need to own a gun? We have police to protect us from criminals." They have, however, no satisfactory solution for what to do when the police are not there but a criminal is, and even less for when the police themselves are the criminals.

In the area of education, liberty people support giving the people the choice of how to educate their children, according to their private preferences and goals. They think people ought to be free to homeschool, if that's what they choose, or to pursue education opportunities in private, religious, or cooperative educational settings. Slavery people, on the other hand, want to force parents to send their children to the public schools, requiring them to adhere to a broken, 19th century educational model patterned after Prussian military academies designed to produce obedient but mindless soldiers for the Kaiser. They think homeschooling should be banned because kids aren't "socialized" (really, socialistized would be a more correct term) and don't learn "community values." Never is the question raised as to whether these (most often left-wing) community values are even worth learning in the first place.

Even in the area of the social issues of the day, we see a stark difference between liberty people and slavery people.

Liberty people oppose the gay agenda, for instance. Liberty people do not believe that the government should redefine a millennia-old, foundational institution of society, just for the ornamental whims of a tiny percentage of the population that has purposefully chosen its peculiar orientation. We don't think that gays ought to have the right to force everyone else to publicly grant approval to their lifestyle choices and sanction them with law. We oppose gays taking their private orientation choice and forcing it onto an unwilling public. While we readily accede that gays may be free to do what they like in private, they do not have the right to force acceptance and approval onto everyone else, as they are currently doing. Liberty people understand that business owners should not be forced (there's that word again) to provide services to gay "weddings" and the like, against their own wills and consciences, and liberty people reject the proposition that churches and other religious organizations should be forced to cater to and support gays in the conduct of their agenda.

Slavery people, on the other hand, think it's perfectly fine to use the power of government to punish people who don't think, say, or do the "right" things with respect to gays and their wants. They're all for tossing out votes of the people, if those votes go against the express wishes of the gay mafia. They think it's just fine to force businesses to cater to gay weddings, and to coerce churches into marrying gays (it already happens in Canada, Europe, and even in some states here in the USA). Destroy the institution of marriage that has been a bedrock of pretty much all human civilization for thousands of years (and make no mistake, gay "marriage" is only a stepping stone to formally abolishing marriage – gay leaders have even said so themselves)? Sure, why not.

Despite what Senator Murkowski might thing, you simply cannot support gay marriage and the gay agenda and support liberty at the same time. The advancement of the gay agenda is a slavery people position, through and through.

Liberty people oppose abortion, as well. Liberty people do not think it is acceptable to murder an unborn child simply because he or she is inconvenient to one or both of his or her parents. We understand that you cannot claim to support liberty and freedom while denying the fundamental right to life to the unborn. Further, we understand that abortion is the supreme expression of irresponsibility, of the immature and stupid desire to avoid taking responsibility for one's own actions. Such irresponsibility is completely incompatible with a free society where the innocent are protected and people act as responsible moral agents who accept the consequences of their own deeds.

Slavery people support abortion because they are morally and ethically stunted, morally deformed individuals who do not want to take responsibility for themselves. Like the welfare addicts who expect someone else to pay their way through life, supporters of abortion expect someone else – in this case the unborn child – to pay the penalty for their mistakes. They don't want to step up like adults and shoulder their responsibilities, or potentially have to should the situation ever arise.

The areas where I could draw distinctions between liberty people and slavery people are inexhaustible and a complete delineation would take far more time than I have to write and the reader has to read. Foundationally, though, the distinction boils down to maturity and responsibility. Liberty people are responsible for themselves, mature, adult actors in ordered society who seek to refrain from imposing undue burdens on others and who expect reciprocation in this. They want other people to leave them alone as much as possible. Slavery people won't take responsibility for themselves, but think others should provide for them a living, comprehensive safety and security from every trial of life, and the "freedom" to impose their own particular lifestyles onto others, regardless of what the others think about this.

The problem facing America is ultimately this – we have far too many slavery people, and far too few liberty people. How to change this situation is the question we must answer, and we may find that it's simply too late – we won't see it change until the whole system comes crashing down and there's no money left to give to the Free Stuff Army and there's no more hyper-intensified legal structure left to support the boutique social causes of the Left. Until that day comes, we who actually care about liberty need to try to avert it by waking as many of our fellow Americans up to what liberty really is.

© Tim Dunkin