Whose Choice Is It Anyway?

Speech given Monday, 23 Oct 95, Boulder County Courthouse Lawn

Good morning. It's good to be here with you today to celebrate a new approach to liberty and justice here in Boulder.

Thirty five years ago, a great American stood before us and declared "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Today, although that ringing challenge still echoes in our ears, we no longer live by it. Instead, we have knelt at the altar of that violent and ferocious phrase, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

You don't think so? Well, let's look at the situation in the the light of some other famous sayings. First:You get what you pay for. Second: Watch out what you ask for, you might get it. Third: A stitch in time saves nine.

You do get what you pay for. You and I've been paying ever increasing tax dollars taken from our pockets and the pockets of working people all across this land. We've been paying that hard earned wealth out to nonworking people. These people aren't working because we've convinced them that our Government owes them a check. We've convinced them that they are either too young or too discriminated against or too disabled to earn a living from the products of their minds or their bodies.

Whenever I see a bus-sized RV traveling down the freeway with the bumper-sticker "We're squandering our children's inheritance," I can't help but think that's exactly what we're doing when we use the aggression of Government to take from those whose competence and carefulness produces economic wealth, and then give away that blood, sweat and tears to the project of making governmentally dependent children out of those whose greatest need is the self-worth and honor that comes from responsibly earning their own living.

Incentives are everything. We've given our disadvantaged citizens every incentive, AFDC, Medicare, Supplemental Security Income, Medicaid: all incentives for our less-advantaged citizens to give up their responsibility for themselves and become dependent. Dependent not on the love and care of their families, but on the faceless and dehumanizing bureaucracy of our Government. Have you heard politicians and writers whining about the breakdown of the family and loss of respect for Government? Well, we've gotten what we paid for. And do we have a choice whether or not we pay for this waste of our disadvantaged citizen's humanity? Should we have that choice?

I once heard a radio announcer who habitually ended her program with, "Watch out what you ask for, because you might get it." We know that mind-altering drugs can harm us and our children, so we've asked our Government for a War on Drugs. What we've gotten is nothing less than a real war. As one political commentator puts it, "Soldiers in a war kill people and break things." Now I want to make it very clear that I am not, nor have I ever been, a user of either legal or illegal drugs. I think that using drugs of either the legal or the illegal kind is most often a way to dull the pain of surface symptoms, and is rarely a cure for the deeper root of a disease.

But once again, incentives are everything. When we make drug selling and drug use illegal, we give away the highest incentive for profit that it is possible to give: scarcity. Because selling drugs is illegal, any dispute over territory or profits has no legal resolution: drug sellers who cannot resolve their disputes in court must then resort to shooting one another with stolen guns, killing civilians in the crossfire: civilians whose own Government has disarmed them. And do we have a choice whether or not to continue to pour $30 Billion a year of our taxes into the violence and degradation of the War on Drugs? Should we have a choice?

But far worse than the drug users' physical addiction is our collective economic addiction to Government entitlements. Instead of providing an environment of freedom and risk for businesses and their hardworking employees, we have taken away their choices and their taxes. Then we've used those ill-gotten gains to seduce ourselves into dependence on the addicting billions we get from our Sugar Daddy, Uncle Sam. We conveniently forget that those very dollars were forced from our own pockets by the Internal Revenue Service. Funny name, that. If that's Service, I could use a lot less of it.

And finally, "A stitch in time saves nine," and we do have one choice today. That choice is the vote we cast and the money and support we give men and women who sacrifice their privacy and their time to become our Representatives in Government. This choice has never been plainer than it is today, right here in Boulder, right now.

You could, for example, choose to vote for politicians who will continue taking taxes from those of us with ability, then giving those taxes away to citizens who have traded away their responsibility for themselves in exchange for satisfying their need of total dependence on Nanny Government. Is that a good choice?

Or you could choose to vote for depoliticians, Libertarians, whose goal is to gain back your individual choices and individual responsibilities, not turn them over to a bumbling and obscenely expensive Government. Isn't that a better choice?

In politics we observe today a victory of party over progress: partisan monopolies that promote the survival of sterile programs and bureaucracies rather than the survival of private businesses and the productive people they employ. You have Representatives from both the Democrat and Republican parties who don't trust you to make your own choices. These monopoly politicians don't believe that you're smart enough to fasten your seat belt, so they pass a law forcing you to do so. They don't believe you're compassionate enough to voluntarily help fellow citizens who truly need a hand up, not a hand out, so they pass a law that takes money from your able pocket and gives it to those whose need is not really money, but self-respect and a job that you might have been able to provide had you had been able to make your own economic choices. These monopoly politicians have passed laws that would make me a criminal if I accepted a check from you for one dollar more than a thousand dollars--their arbitrary limit on your political choice. These are the same monopoly politicians who instead of applying a single stitch of incentive that gets to the heart of a problem, are willing to spend nine billion (well, make that ten billion with inflation, no eleven billion with cost of living increases) stitches to sew up the problems they've created by their own shortsightedness.

But I am not a politician, and have no aspirations to become one. I'm also not a lawyer. I'm an ordinary working American who is tired of being forced into the non-choices our present Government provides. I'm a Libertarian, a member of the only political party today that truly respects your democratic choices instead of the choices of a bunch of lawyers whose respect is instead for every PAC and lobbying group from the Amazonians to the Zyklon Society.

If you elect me to the office of U.S. Congress, 2nd District, I promise only two things, first that I am self term-limited to four years, should you choose to return me to office in 1998, and second I promise to always look out for your individual choice and individual responsibility, not the choices of those who would seduce you from responsibility and force you into either their economic or their moral mold.

I challenge you here today to support and vote for Libertarians, who ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for you. I ask for your support of my candidacy for U.S. Congress 2nd District, Colorado. I promise not to bring to the 2nd District more money coerced from the pocketbooks of working people in Boston or San Francisco. I promise instead to work tirelessly to put our Federal Government on the diet that Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic party proclaimed when he said, "A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."

To learn more about Libertarians and the way they think, check out the Future of Freedom Foundation

Earl would enjoy email from you: wea@allmax.com

W. Earl Allen's home page:   http://www.allmax.com/wea