Freedom

Most people believe freedom is a wonderful thing and while that is most certainly true, freedom without responsibility often creates chaos. We all remember the saying growing up that everyone has the right to free speech, but yelling fire in a crowded movie theatre is irresponsible.

A free market system works in the same way. Big business creating competitive advantages through unfair business practices and big labor unions creating uncompetitive wage agreements are no less irresponsible as the individual yelling fire in a crowded movie theatre.

These predatory practices, by the individual, companies or labor are the reason our country has laws and legislation. The problem lies in that all to often, the individual ends up being the only one that has to pay the price for their indiscretions.

Big business and big labor both have powerful lobbies to influence our elected officials and consequently an ill-informed electorate pays the price with lost job opportunities or higher prices for the goods and services they purchase.

We as individuals can no longer just blindly trust our elected officials to be statesman and do what is in the country's best interest when they pander to the short sighted politics that may in the near term benefit their local constituency but does long term damage to the economy and eventually hurts the country as a whole.

Many states just like individuals spend beyond their means and when economic hard times arise, they are ill prepared to fend off financial hardship. But unlike the individual, states can exert extreme pressure on federal legislators to procure federal tax dollars to help bail them out. This double standard is unacceptable as federal assistance comes from every citizen in the country.

This helps explain the dynamic of how big government continually grows. Our federal legislators act irresponsibly and get federal assistance for states, big business or big labor due to lobbing interests they have and when the individual taxpayer sees these massive bailouts or sweetheart deals they say what about me? So what do many of our elected officials do? They bailout the irresponsible individual as well.

Two wrongs never made a right, but this is exactly what many elected officials do because they only creed they live by is to get re-elected. Irresponsible behavior on whatever level, should be made to pay the price. If a individual commits a crime, they pay a price right? But our elected officials operate under the guise that they know better and compose legislation so complex that they only can understand it with the help of massive staffs. They often justify this legislation by claiming to correct the imbalances created by anyone but themselves.

The end result is you have many elected officials bartering away the rights of every American in order to placate their own special interests. With 435 members in the House and 100 in the Senate, you can readily see the utter mess that can ensue when our elected officials act primarily in their own interests instead of the country as a whole.

Serving in government should not be a profession, but a selfless act of service to ones country similar to service in the military. You run for office for a set amount of time and then go back to being a private citizen. Limiting terms of all elected offices should be the mantra all concerned citizens rally around. Change in the legislative process has to come in order to reverse the obscence growth of government entitlement programs that while sounding high-minded are so bereft with waste and bureaucracy that inefficiencies are the rule, not the exception.