2.  STATISTS TO LIBERTARIANS: "YOU CAN'T WIN!"
    by Tim Condon 
    Exclusive to TLE    http://www.webleyweb.com/tle/>     Issue 224

The taunt goes out, from sea to shining sea, reflecting off purple
mountains' majesty, across amber waves of grain, throughout the home of the
brave and the land of the free: "Give it up,
suckers!" Forget about human freedoms that are guaranteed by
our Constitution, bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers, they say.
"You can't win!"

This perpetual taunt goes out from all the dark corners of American
political punditry like some tired, ugly Marxist cant that can't be killed.
"It's historically inevitable!" goes the
argument, so give it up, you libertarians, you Constitutionalists, you
classical liberals, you patriots and freedom-lovers of all stripes.

"You can't win!"

The First Amendment, they happily point out, is being shouted down in the
name of "campaign reform." The Second Amendment is being shot
full of holes by patently unconstitutional "gun control" laws,
including "assault weapon" bans. The Fourth Amendment has its
door smashed and trashed in the name of "the war on drugs." The
Fifth Amendment is bound and gagged in the name of ensuring successful
prosecutions, and prisoners convicted of crimes that shouldn't even be on
the books are thrown into hell-hole prisons filled with rape and violence
where the strong eat the weak and human decency perishes. The Ninth and
Tenth Amendments, in the meantime, are almost wholly ignored.

On and on the litany goes, driven by authoritarians and other lovers of
unleashed government from both the Left and the Right. "Give
it up, you freedom-loving fools," they taunt.
"You can't win."

There's just one question: Why can't we win? What's so awful about Liberty
in our lifetimes? Why can't we preserve the human, individual, God-given,
Constitutional freedoms promised by America's founders?

Why? Because that's not the way things work in the world, they gleefully
tell us. We need only look as far as Thomas Jefferson to see the truth of
it. "The natural progress of things," Jefferson wrote to a friend
in 1788, "is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."

Today in particular we can feel the truth of Jefferson's words, as multiple
states teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, billions of dollars in debt, from
one end of the country to the other. How did they get that way? Why,
through "the natural progress of things." By overspending,
over-reaching, over-taxing, and over-bloating their already bloated state
governments during the high-living, high-taxing, high-spending good
economic times of the 1990's. And
then, when the inevitable results come rolling in, by wailing that
"it's not our fault."

In the meantime, perpetually wrong fools in our "watchdog media"
hold forth with the same perpetually wrong advice, elderly nostrums tried
and failed, tried and failed: We need more government! We need to increase
taxes to pay for "essential services" that are
"demanded" by "the people"! It's the fault of "the
anti-tax zealots"! The problem lies in Washington, DC! They should be
taking care of the problem! (One such newspaper columnist, John Balzar of
the Los Angeles Times, actually wrote much of the above in a column
published on May 11, 2003, concluding, incredibly, that "in important
ways the states never had a chance.")

"You don't have a chance! You're losers! Give up your stupid
ideas about individual freedom! History is on our side!"

And then a strange thing happened. There came a young man named Jason
Sorens. One good man, with one good idea. It is called "the Free State
Project." If he were some kind of American prophet, he would be saying
something like, "I have a dream! A dream where all of us may stand
fast in the liberty wherewith the Founding Fathers made us free. We can
attain our freedom, throw off our modern chains, and be not entangled again
with the yoke of bondage!"

American prophet or not, how would we go about fighting the
"inevitable tide of history"? How can we resist Jefferson's
"natural progress of things"?

Just like this: You change the internal dynamics of the working machinery
of government. You fundamentally change the power-relationship between
government and the governed. You make the strengths of government power
work in favor of freedom for a change, and
against further expansion of that same government power.
You make the normal, powerful, centralizing, expansionary, power-lusting,
authoritarian tendencies of government and the people who seek to seize and
wield its power...their weakness. In short, you change
the rules of the game. You stop---and then
reverse---"the natural progress of things."

In shorter, more direct terms, you read, think about, debate, discuss, and
then implement five simple reforms. You read "Political Reform in the
Freestate," http://www.freestateproject.org/five_reforms.htm>
by Tim Condon,
Membership Services Director of the Free State Project.

And then you---we, all of us---make it happen.

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