Applying Logic To Politics

Deborah Venable

04/27/03

Politics is defined as the art or science of government. I hear too many people say that they do not care about or wish to learn about politics. Some simply say that they do not understand it, and therefore it is not important to them. I believe that this is exactly how logic gets removed from politics. When that happens, corruption finds the door to government wide open. This apathy to politics would make little difference in a society that did not govern itself. However, it is unacceptable and totally destructive to the government of the United States of America. Self government suggests - no, demands - that all citizens care about politics.

The overwhelming apathy in this country has already damaged our government almost beyond repair. We are no longer a society with an effective self-government. Instead, our government reeks with tyranny. And still too many do not care! Our children are not properly educated in politics, and logic is not applied in much of society’s political thinking. The center pole, or bridge, has been abandoned or completely destroyed. History books containing the foundations of our governmental principles have been re-written. Indeed, our representative republic has been overrun with socialism. Government is seething with corruption, and still, people don’t care or cannot be bothered with politics.

The art and science of government is a complicated subject to appreciate and understand respectively. It makes us use our intellect. It reminds us of our mortality. It can secure or condemn our progeny’s future happiness depending on our own actions in the present. That is a huge responsibility. Far too many are not willing to shoulder it. For those who are unwilling to take up the gauntlet of self-government, there are many places in the world for you to go. Check your human rights and dignity at the border and have a nice life. For the rest of us, we had better get back to the business of insuring our progeny’s future health and happiness. Appreciate the beauty of a system of government that allows individual responsibility and justice. Understand the underpinnings of such a government and oil well the machinery.

Instead of electing legislators who wish only to put more laws on the books, we need to seek out only those who would go into the legislative chambers with the goal of striking down the unjust glut of legalities that are strangling society. We need to elect only those executors of the “law” who are willing to recognize injustice whenever they see it. We also need to know enough to weed out the corrupt officers of the courts by insisting that our representatives call them on their injustices and bring them up on charges. All three branches of government need cleaning out. Both major political parties need fumigating. There is an unbearable stench in the assemblages of both. We, the people, have the duty to do these things while we still can. We have the responsibility of learning what we don’t know so that we may do our duty.

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly,

while bad people will find a way around the laws."

‑ Plato (427‑347 B.C.)

Obviously Plato has yet to be taken seriously on this point, but it is so true. Laws are a necessary evil in a civil society, but too many laws spawn too much evil and corruption. This is all too logical. Rules are made to be broken, or a preconceived consequence would not be a part of law at all. Good people do not need incentives to be good, because well adjusted, good people find out early in life that being good just feels better than being bad. It is much easier on the body and the mind to be self-disciplined toward right. Laws have a way of breeding resentment and indifference to other people’s priorities. Could humans live together civilly without law? Probably not; but they could certainly live together more civilly without so many laws. Bad people have no intention of allowing themselves to be ruled by the laws of good people, but they certainly use law to justify their own evil and to control their enemies. Present day legislators in our government use unbridled lawmaking to justify their chosen positions in life. This is not only sad, but a great danger to any society.

Incrementally applied laws, (hereafter referred to as “incrementalism”) allow tyranny to encroach on liberty. I am not at all sure that liberty can be wrenched from the jaws of tyranny incrementally. I do not believe this has ever been accomplished. Where does that leave us? That’s a tough one. By the same token, we are ill equipped for a revolution against a tyranny that most do not even recognize. I think about the only thing we can do is apply a coating of phosphorescence to the enemies of liberty so that when the darkness comes, as it will, they will be recognizable.

So many laws in our society today defy, ignore, or reject any kind of logic that might and should be applied to human government. Incrementalism started in the most innocent way, with one set of people trying to define what we humans needed protection from, and the majority of the rest of us going along with it in the name of that protection. When we started doing this, we made the fears of our Founding Fathers come true. We had to ignore much of what was written into our founding documents, and each time it became easier for more of us to do it. Each time, the laws fell further away from any possible application of logic.

I believe that safety was the first incremental step we stubbed our toes on. When the majority of us decided that freedoms should be encroached in order to make us safer, we spelled impending doom to our country as we had known it. Did we get any safer because of it? No, just the opposite in fact. Let’s take a look at a set of fundamental laws that managed to turn our heads away from freedom in search of safety. As most of our population began to acquire personal automobiles, we became an even freer society than we had ever been before. Some in government just couldn’t stand this. The traffic laws grew by leaps and bounds. The acquisition of automobiles and the privilege to drive them had to be complicated, and it had to become a great source of income to the governments. Local, state and federal government regulations on the manufacture, sales, and licensing of automobiles, and the instruction and licensing of drivers began to strangle the industry as it encroached on more and more personal freedoms. People did not have the sense to choose safety for themselves, the government decided, so it had to regulate everything to a standard of safety that applied to the small percentage of regulators. Of course some traffic laws were necessary to maintain order in congested areas, but as for the safety laws governing much of the manufacture of “safe” automobiles - well, they are just ludicrous. True safety features would have sold themselves to the majority of people without being mandated. Demand would have driven the market, but regulation, which began to only strangle the industry and force higher and higher prices, led the way to more and more government interference in our lives. At the same time, concerns about fuel efficiency became not a choice for individuals to make, but a government demand to be met by manufacturers. Overnight America’s auto industry went from a smorgasbord of innovative, distinctly American choices to a uniform production line of government approved, slimmed down, indistinctive, foreign looking photo copies. Each and every one of these, of course, is packed with such “necessary” items as seat belts, air bags, and child safety locks. And, worse, we have mandates that force us to use them or break the law!

The cars themselves are death traps. No longer do we have the choice to purchase new cars made of heavy steel instead of collapsible fiberglass unless we get a large truck. No longer can we expect to find real guts under the hood without paying an exorbitant price tag with ridiculous registration fees and insurance premiums. No longer can the average guy expect to look under the hood and find familiarity that shade tree mechanics have enjoyed tinkering with for decades in the past. For the average new car price tag you will instead get something with four wheels that looks like everything else on the road, that will fold up under any kind of impact, that will labor to get up a hill, and that will require a garage with state-of-the-art technical equipment and a team of “automotive technicians” to do a simple tune up on the engine! And God help you if you choose not to fasten your seat belt for that run to the store to buy milk. You will be dubbed a law-breaking, irresponsible driver and pay a much higher price for the milk if a police officer sees you! Your chances for surviving an impact if a speeding driver side swipes you before you can get back home are not as good as they used to be when you were surrounded by real steel. But, of course, you get better gas mileage. If you should escape serious injury from such an accident, though, you can count on the fact that your car probably won’t. In fact, it will probably be totaled.

If I sound a little bitter in the preceding paragraph, it is with good cause. I am old enough to remember when cars were cars and choice was choice. I loved the big old American cars of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. For several years during that time we drove an old ‘59 VW Bug, but that was our choice. My husband was in the military and we moved around a lot, so it was cheap transportation, and for most of the time we didn’t have children. Some people considered that car to be a death trap, but even then it had steel fenders. The one time I did get side swiped in it, the fender and bumper were replaced for a couple hundred dollars. I received no injury, and, no, I wasn’t wearing a seat belt. In my opinion, it was a much safer car than the average one you drive off a showroom floor today.

Now, I’m all for clean air, don’t get me wrong. I just believe that it could be more effectively accomplished with incentives and not mandates. The pollution control industry, (and that is exactly what it is), sprang up around the auto industry and strangled much of the innovative creativity that made it great. The automotive pollution control industry is peppered with corruption and ineffectiveness. If you do not believe this, then you are very naive.

Seatbelts save lives. I’m not going to argue with that one. There is no way to determine the number of lives they save, however, and there is absolutely no justification for mandating that car manufacturers put them in every vehicle, or that every driver and passenger wear them. Why? Because they can also be the very cause of death or serious injury, they should not be mandated! Even if seatbelts save a thousand lives, if they cause one death, there is no justification for forcing the industry to supply them or people to wear them! That is simple logic, my friends. I have known people that would have been killed if they had been wearing a seat belt in traffic accidents. I have also known of people who died because they were.

Another reason against mandating seatbelts is the obvious intrusion on our freedom. Personally, I suffer from claustrophobia. The restriction of a seatbelt is not only uncomfortable to me, but also somewhat debilitating. I do not allow my children to act wild while riding down the road, but I would appreciate being left alone to teach them to make their own choices about their own safety whenever I decide that the choice is theirs’ and not mine. I certainly do not appreciate that the choice should ever be the government’s! Just how ridiculous is it that we allow women to kill babies in the name of “choice,” but give no credence to my choice not to wear a seatbelt or force my children to. I am considered an abusive parent if my children are not buckled up. I can be stopped, reprimanded, and fined an exorbitant amount of money for it. If I’m not very, very careful, the state can even step in and take my children away from me for being unfit. I actually had a policeman tell me that if I wasn’t going to protect my children, he would! He was young enough to be my son, and he felt very justified giving me a tongue lashing while my children watched and ran late for school. I received a $200 ticket at the same time. However, it is perfectly legal for a woman to have her baby killed and sucked or drug out of her body, and she is considered “responsible” enough to keep any existing or subsequent children, or even come back next month and kill another one! No logic, folks, there is just absolutely no logic there!

The government’s dedication to public safety does not stop with intrusion on personal preference where seat belts are concerned of course. Let’s look at the wonderful work our politicians are doing to protect us from those mean old citizens who have the nerve to own guns! Guns kill people you know - or, if you listen to the NRA, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” How profound! Is that the best you can do? The fact that we are even having to fight this battle escapes any intervention of logical thinking, so it is no wonder that the soldiers sent out to fight it are ill equipped to say the least. On any given day you will hear the media spouting the key words to this battle - gun control legislation and Second Amendment Rights. Once again, the entire point is missed, so an “issue” is born and continues to grow. How absolutely ignorant is it to believe that we do not have the right to protect ourselves? How stupid are people to be drawn into a battle that should not exist in the first place? That’s right - I said the gun control battle should not exist in the first place.

Private citizens should have the right to and the access to any and all weapons at the disposal of their government or any other government or individual. That is only logical. As soon as you put the first restriction on this through a single exception with a single piece of legislation, you have invited disaster to befall our country and our form of government. Right now most of you are saying to yourselves, “Now wait a minute! It’s okay to restrict children, criminals, and crazy people from obtaining or using guns, isn’t it?” My answer - Absolutely not! Children are responsible for themselves only when their parents or guardians are no longer responsible. It should be up to those parents or guardians to impose such restrictions, therefore. Criminals should not be let out of prison until they can be trusted - if they can’t be trusted, then leave them locked up. Crazy people - same thing. If we try to legislate guns out of the hands of these people, we open the door for the laws to eat away at the rest of society. The only people who will be unaffected by these laws are criminals and the government’s military and representatives. Hello! These are the only people the rest of society needs be afraid of and protected from!

Responding to a proposal to register arms:

"Absolutely not! If the people are armed and the federalists do not know where the arms are,

there can never be an oppressive government."

~ George Washington

George was right then - and he most definitely is still right today!

Much of the gun control legislation hinges on the belief that people would be safer from accidents if these laws exist. Well, in truth, you cannot legislate away accidents. You can only take away freedom. It is up to individuals to prevent accidents through individual responsibility. Individuals should consider their own safety issues, and their first concern should be to insure their safety from governmental power. Where in the world did we ever get the idea that government was supposed to insure individuals’ safety? Not from the belief system and values that gave birth to this country and made it great - that is for sure!

Probably the most destructive human actions stem from selfishness. Now, you might think that selfishness is easily defined, but it isn’t. For example: in government, people have been convinced that the only unselfish form of government is a derivative of socialism. Without going into details of governmental differences, I will simply say that this is a wrong assumption. Socialism removes the natural human expression of compassion that flourishes in a free and capitalistic society. When selfishness drowns out compassion, you can be sure that socialism is at work. All we need do is look around us and take a good look at the “laws” that are being enacted. When a government takes away the necessity for individuals to take care of themselves, it essentially renders human compassion unnecessary.

Politics does not follow logic because logic, for some reason or other, is not persuasive. If humanity could ever develop a purely logical system of government, humanity could be saved much grief, but politicians could not be expected to run such a government. Wait a minute! Two hundred and twenty-seven years ago, such a system of government was instituted in the United States of America! Unbridled politicians were not expected to run it, we, the people were! Allowing such a system to erode to the present conditions we see in our government, is not only illogical, it is truly disrespectful of all who have died to preserve it. How dare we!

Socialism had no place in the minds of the Founding Fathers - no place in the government of the United States. Why then, have we, the descendents of those great men with such noble foresight, turned away from independence and toward socialism? Well, we might easily blame it on the fact that we, the descendents, are no longer the majority of we, the people. Logic might even point us in that direction. After all, the borders have been flooded with refugees and immigrants from every country in the world for more than two hundred years now. Many of these immigrants have refused to leave their culture at home, but instead insisted on bringing it with them and promoting it among we, the descendents, to the point that we have lost much of our own culture! Don’t get me wrong, it was fine that they found a place to be free to worship as they wished, dress as they wished, raise their children as they wished, and remember their own roots. The problem is that they were not happy to stop there. They insisted on growing their own crop of sub-cultures and allowing it to spread through the cultivated, descendent driven, most important American Culture like weeds until they began to choke the very life out of what made this country great. Much of the substance of these sub-cultures is based in socialism, and, my friends, socialism does not mix with independent, freedom loving, God trusting American Patriotism of the caliber that made this country a place where they wanted to come.

Like I said, it would be easy and even logical to put America’s demise off on the immigrants and refugees from foreign cultures. However, if we truly are worthy of calling ourselves we, the descendents of our Founding Fathers, that’s not good enough. Majority was never a necessity for American patriotic victory. Two-thirds of the citizens of the American Colonies of 1776 were against the fight for independence from England. Two-thirds! They were perfectly willing to continue to pay exorbitant taxes without representation, remain subjugated to the British Crown, and turn in their guns to the King’s soldiers. Their perception of safety was protection by, not protection from their ruler. Ah, but that brave and brilliant one-third - those who hungered for true freedom, who insisted that they and their progeny be in charge of their own destiny, who were willing to sacrifice everything they had for what they believed in and what was really important - they were victorious. They built the greatest country on earth with the smallest government intrusion on individuals’ lives in history, and then they predicted that we might one day lose it if we did not persevere along the trail they blazed. Less than a hundred years later, we wandered into the wilderness and we haven’t found our way out since.

“Yes, we did produce a near perfect republic,

but will they keep it, or will they, in the

enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom?”____

~ Thomas Jefferson ~

Ben Franklin warned that:

"They that can give up essential liberty to

obtain a little temporary safety deserve

neither liberty nor safety."_

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