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When society continually makes imprudent choices, it creates problems with no solutions.

October 19, 2012

To Vote, or Not To Vote?

Government’s purpose is not to provide for your happiness. Its purpose is to protect your creator endowed rights of life and liberty so you can pursue happiness. If you don’t have life, you can’t make choices. If you can’t make your own choices (government makes them for you), you can’t pursue happiness. If you make prudent choices – happiness. If you make imprudent choices – misery. But you are, and hopefully want to be, ultimately responsible for your own choices and the outcome of those choices – be they successes or failures.

But even a government that focuses on preserving individual liberty is eventually only as good as its people and the decisions they make. When you continually make imprudent choices, you get buried by your own problems. But when society as a whole continually makes imprudent choices, then it creates problems to which there are no solutions. And it is at this point when some begin to cry to government to fix their misery. But unless you eventually want a dictatorship, instead of a free society, you must choose a government that protects your individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As long as these rights are protected, you can chose again, and even if you’ve made mistakes in the past (unless you are on death-row), learn from your mistakes and pursue happiness yet again.

Government can’t really change people, but it can protect individual rights. Individuals are responsible for individual change, and thereby affecting social change. Yes, people can help people, and people should help people. But one can only help others to the extent that they are whole and have something to contribute. Dependents (and co-dependents) can’t contribute much until they are independent, self-sufficient, and equipped to help others become the same. But again, government cannot make anyone whole, or determine the standard for wholeness. It can only protect your right to pursue it.

People change slowly. When you try to control people, and force them to change, they resent it, even if they seem to be going along with you. These resentments can last for generations, with no one really changing in heart – just in appearances – as power simply shifts, back and forth from one group to another. However, we can and must control our government, while we still can, by voting. If you don’t vote, you are, in essence, voting for Obama and against limited government.

I don’t think Mitt Romney is the Savior of the world, anymore than I thought Barack Obama was. (That seat has definitely already been taken). But I’m voting for Romney in this 2012 election because he is running on a limited government platform. If Romney doesn’t uphold the principles of limited government, that will protect my rights and the rights of other individuals, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then I’ll fire him come 2016. Personally, I think he is up for the task.

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