Thursday, March 26, 2009

On the GIVE Act

Such a cute name.  "GIVE".  A more apt title might be "GIVE! (or else!)"

Apparently my almost "blow off" post the other day on (what I called) the Hitler Youth Act is attracting a lot of attention ... for this little corner of the blog-o-verse... lately.  If you're one of those people, welcome.  I'm not in it for the attention, but welcome.  Poke around.  

On that same site (opencongress.org) another blog that was linked had an article that looked like a memo that went out to the Rock The Vote crowd ... youth activist groups -- urging members to call their congress-critters and urge them to vote for it.  I was compelled to leave a response, which I'll reproduce here.
Reshape the country on your own dime. When the government decides to take charge of shaping the citizenry, we transform from being in control of the government to the government controlling us. We change from free men to subjects.

Many groups would like to shape America. Animal rights groups (vegans, etc). Religious groups. Nazis. The KKK. Uber-environmental groups. And as long as they want to do it on their own dime and try to convince people their causes are worth joining, it's ok with me. That's the way it's supposed to work. Win me over by argument, or try, anyway.

When arguments fail to persuade people, there is always the temptation to go to the government and use it's coercive power to force people to do what we cannot persuade them to do. This goes against every ideal our Founders layed out for the country. And yet it's been done successfully, over and over. It doesn't make it right.

This is not the job of government. Changing society is the job of you and me, and we may have conflicting opinions. We let the marketplace of ideas work it out.

The worst part of this is forcing people to fund the indoctrination of their own children it things they might very well be directly opposed to themselves.

There is nothing stopping anyone from organizing their own volunteer organizations, indeed, there have been many since before the country began. We need to stop looking to government to do these things for us. That's not its role.

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