Beware of Greeks (or politicans) advocating conformity.

Beware of people who tell you to "Get in line." It's much easier to gun people down, or march them off to the "showers," when they're standing in nice, neat little rows.

A Tyranny of "Good Guys"

The desire for power is not a vice that afflicts only "bad guys". Often "good guys" will attempt to acquire power in order to force their ideals on others (ostensibly for their own good) or else to keep power out of the hands of the "bad guys". Unfortunately, however, history bears out that "good guys" who seek power for these purposes often become the worst of the "bad guys" because they pursue their goals with the approval of their conscience.

"Good guys" that seek power for such aims are suspicious of anyone who stands in their way, viewing such people as either misled or else one of the "bad guys", but, either way, a threat to what is "good". They resent even being questioned. This is how dissenters become 'enemies of the State', and ultimately victims of its oppression, even when "good guys" are in charge. This is also why legislation such as the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act (among others) and the concepts that "unlawful enemy combatants" and "terror suspects" have, essentially, no rights at all, and that torture is really a good and necessary thing, are going to end up destroying the freedoms and enslaving the people they were ostensibly meant to protect.

The only thing that can protect freedom in the long run is a staunchly upheld separation of powers, emphasizing individuals rather than artificial entities such as the State (and unquestioning loyalty thereto).

One sure-fire way to tell when you're heading downhill fast under a tyranny of "good guys" is when they bristle at being questioned and demand the right to operate in secret. When this happens - as it is now happening - look out.

"No" - by Matt Hawes of Ron Paul's 'Campaign for Liberty'

http://www.campaignforliberty.org/profile/7788/blog/2011/07/28/no

Multiple sources reported yesterday that House Speaker John Boehner told Republican representatives to “get your a-- in line” and support his debt ceiling compromise during a meeting on Wednesday.

Why is the GOP leadership scrambling for support? Because they know the American people are outraged at yet another surrender and are putting historic pressure on Republican members to reject any business as usual proposal that will keep our country running full steam ahead toward economic disaster.

I hope you contact your representative today with one simple message. When threatened to “get in line” to support the statist quo and presented with the leadership’s plan today, tell them to just say “no.”

No to phony deals.

No to more debt.

No to more runaway spending.

No to selling out our futures so they can make an unpopular, desperate president happy.

To try to pacify those who actually want to solve our nation’s problems, the leadership put together a plan that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates will reduce the deficit by $917 billion.

Over the next ten years.

Meanwhile, they’ll let the President have a $900 billion increase in the debt ceiling – right away.

But wait! The leadership is bragging that their plan will reduce the Fiscal Year 2012 budget deficit by a whole $22 billion – in what’s expected to be an over $1 trillion deficit.

That is, frankly, insulting.

You know how you convince people to “get in line”?

You lead.

Real leadership wouldn’t require a panicked scramble that involves cursing at the people you courted to get power less than a year ago.

Real leadership wouldn’t require threatening your fellow members of Congress.

Real leadership during this economic crisis would inspire the American people, who would take care of putting the pressure on their elected officials because they would see that you were willing to fight for legitimate change.

Real leadership would follow Senator Rand Paul’s example by calling for at least $500 billion in cuts this year and an immediate, fundamental change in how government operates.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of being told I’m “extreme” because I think it’s fiscally responsible to drastically cut spending when we’re trillions of dollars in debt.

So, please, join me in contacting Congress to urge our representatives to oppose the House Republican Leadership’s so-called “plan.”

Over half a million Americans have “gotten in line” with the freedom message by joining Campaign for Liberty because they know we are fighting for solutions – not surrender.

If the House Republican Leadership expects people to join them, then they should start trying to give people something worth following.

Freedom Quote of the Day

"Freedom has ceased to be a birthright; it has come to mean 'whatever we are still permitted to do'." - Joe Sobran

A Tribute to Samantha Smith

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” – Matthew 5:9

I was only ten years old in 1983, but I well remember the political tensions of the time. In those days, my family and I lived in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, a mere stone’s throw from Washington D.C.; and I knew enough even then to realize that, if the Soviet Union ever decided to send President Reagan some radioactive airmail, we would be there to sign for it right along with him. I imagined that I had some idea of how awful a nuclear war would be (looking back on it, I was clueless, really), but I also thought that there was a whole lot of nothing I could do about it. If and when the alarms went off and the Emergency Broadcast System interrupted Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to announce that negotiations between East and West had broken down for the final time, well, I figured that that would be that. I had heard that Soviet ICBMs would take around forty minutes to reach us, whereas submarine-launched missiles would take maybe less than half of that time. We were too close to the city to go anywhere fast, not when hundreds of thousands of other people would be trying to get out of Dodge, too, and points to the south and west of us would likely be hit as well (Dulles Airport and Quantico among them…cue Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”). My only consolation at the time was the knowledge that, while my parents and I were running for the basement with what we could carry, somewhere out there Uncle Sam would be sending the commies a formal protest, one inscribed on the gleaming steel cylinders of thousands of nuclear bombs and missiles of our own – and our stuff was better than theirs. Surely, we wouldn’t lose.

Meanwhile, while I was busy imagining how manfully (or not) I would face The End, a little girl living several hundred miles to the north had considered the same scenario and put her foot down. Enough of this “Will we or won’t we?” business, Samantha Smith decided. It was time to call the Soviets out.

Writing to the newly installed General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov, in November of 1982, Smith was charmingly polite but to the point:

My name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old. Congratulations on your new job. I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren't please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war. This question you do not have to answer, but I would like to know why you want to conquer the world or at least our country. God made the world for us to live together in peace and not to fight.

The Soviets received Samantha’s letter and published it in Pravda. Later, in April of 1983, Samantha received a reply from Andropov himself. In it, Andropov complimented her courage and assured her that the Soviet people deplored the idea of nuclear war every bit as much as Americans did:

We want nothing of the kind. No one in our country– neither workers, peasants, writers nor doctors, neither grown-ups nor children, nor members of the government–want either a big or 'little' war.

We want peace—there is something that we are occupied with: growing wheat, building and inventing, writing books and flying into space. We want peace for ourselves and for all peoples of the planet. For our children and for you, Samantha.

Andropov followed this assurance with an invitation for Samantha to visit the Soviet Union, to meet the people, visit a children’s camp and, in short, to “see for yourself: in the Soviet Union, everyone is for peace and friendship among peoples.”

Samantha and her parents accepted Andropov’s invitation, and history was made. The intrepid little girl from Maine became an instant, global celebrity, an inspiration to millions who feared for the future, as well as an object of skepticism on the part those who felt that the Soviet government was using her for propaganda purposes. Dubbed “America’s Youngest Ambassador,” Samantha spent two weeks in the Soviet Union and was impressed with the friendliness of the Soviet people (although she never did meet Yuri Andropov in person, the Soviet leader being seriously ill and in seclusion at the time). Upon returning to the United States, Samantha continued for a time in the public eye, speaking at the Children’s International Symposium in Kobe, Japan, (during which she suggested an “International Granddaughter Exchange” in order to facilitate peace and understanding between opposing countries), interviewing various political figures during the 1984 general election campaign, writing a book about her trip to the Soviet Union, and even starring in a television show.

What more Samantha Smith might have accomplished, and in what direction her budding idealism might have developed, can only be imagined; tragically, both she and her father were killed in a plane crash while traveling home to Maine from California on August 25, 1985. She was thirteen-years-old.

I still remember the media attention that surrounded Samantha Smith and her trip to the Soviet Union. Most of the adults I overheard in conversation at the time were of the opinion that she was being used by the Soviets to put a pleasant face on Communism, and I pretty well took my cue from what I heard. Still, I couldn’t help but be impressed that a kid just like me had captured the world’s attention by the simple act of writing a letter. What Samantha had done challenged my perception of the world as a place where one person could not make a difference, unless that person happened to be rich and famous.

Samantha also challenged me in another important way in that what she had to say about her visit made me really see, for the first time, that the Soviet people were distinct from their government. Prior to that time, I had seen the entire Soviet Union, down to the last individual, as a repressive monstrosity, teeming with evil, dedicated to the destruction of human freedom in general and the United States of America in particular. I would not have been saddened had I heard that the earth had opened up and swallowed the entire country in one righteous gulp. I was only a child then, of course, immature, lacking in knowledge of the world at large, and fiercely loyal to “my side,” as children so often are (and as Samantha Smith herself was at first, given the wording of her letter to Andropov); but my worldview began to mature after Samantha opened the Soviet Union up a little and let us average folk have a look inside. From then on, the tragedy of nuclear war (of war at all, for that matter) took on a new dimension. I no longer saw only American children huddled in their basements in fear of impending annihilation, but Soviet children as well – both equally wanting to live and grow up, both feeling equally helpless as their governments tried to destroy one another for whatever reason.

Now, don’t get me wrong here: none of this should be taken as an apology for the Soviet Union. The Soviet state was, in fact, a repressive monstrosity, second only to Communist China in terms of oppression and murder among the nations of the modern world. Nor was Yuri Andropov the grandfatherly sort of man that Samantha Smith envisioned him when she received his reply to her letter. In reality, Andropov was brutal and ruthless, a true believer in iron-fisted tyranny. He had played a key role in the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Afghanistan, and, had he been younger and in better health when he ascended to the leadership of the Soviet empire, East and West might very well have had that war they so narrowly avoided.

So, no, Yuri Andropov was no kindly old reformed Communist who was trying to display the fruits of his repentance before the world. His invitation to Samantha Smith was a convenient propaganda piece, and a masterful one at that. Whether it was his idea or a bit of public relations magic his handlers conjured up for him, we may never know; but it was a play that would have made Lenin himself crack a chilly smile. It scored the Soviet government some brownie points in the court of international opinion at the time.

That said, however, Samantha’s visit ultimately back-fired on the Soviet government more than it benefited it, and for two reasons in particular: first, by providing a much needed respite in an atmosphere of otherwise unremitting hostility; and second, as I’ve already indicated with regard to myself, her visit caused the American and Soviet people to re-evaluate one another a bit. As the Christmas truce of the First World War demonstrates, the last thing that most governments want is their people mixing with the enemy, as, more often than not, once those peoples come together, they discover that those they have been trained to hate really don’t sleep in coffins or toss babies about on bayonets. The Soviet people impressed Samantha with their – well, humanity – and she opened their eyes a bit as well; the Soviets eventually named a diamond, a mountain and an asteroid after her, and issued a postage stamp with her likeness. At the time of her death, Mikhail Gorbachev wrote:

Everyone in the Soviet Union who has known Samantha Smith will forever remember the image of the American girl who, like millions of Soviet young men and women, dreamt about peace, and about friendship between the peoples of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Samantha once told Nightline’s Ted Koppel that she hoped her efforts on behalf of peace would do some good. Clearly, they did. While Samantha herself never lived to see the Berlin Wall battered to pieces and the hammer-and-sickle lowered from the spires of Moscow to the cheers of hopeful millions, she became a symbol of the courageous vision that brought about those events in the fullness of time.

History’s gallery walls are crowded with the portraits of warriors, conquerors and tyrants, but precious few advocates for peace. And of those few, Samantha Smith is unique; never before or since has anyone so young impacted the world stage, and she did so at an especially crucial time. It is to our shame and detriment that we have largely forgotten her. Today’s troubled world could use an infusion of her optimism and her call for understanding. We could do with a reminder that, although there are truly evil people in the world and we do right in opposing them, far too often we allow ourselves to be overcome by prejudices that blind us in terms of how we perceive other cultures, and how they perceive us.

And so, here’s to you, Samantha, one of the blessed peacemakers, from one of your generation who still remembers. You challenged us. You encouraged us. You gave us hope. You did us proud.

Samantha Smith’s official web page: http://www.samanthasmith.info/

Anthony Gregory on the Causes, Aftermath, and Lessons of 9/11

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, much has changed about life here in these United States. Much has also changed about the way in which this country conducts itself abroad. The issues at stake have created deep divisions among us: why can't we get Osama bin Laden? was the Iraq war necessary? what do we do now?

In the following wonderful article, Campaign for Liberty editor-in-chief Anthony Gregory examines the causes, aftermath and lessons of 9/11. What he says may be difficult for some to accept, but I feel that it will be impossible to deny:

***

Understanding the Atrocity

Why did it happen? One answer given was that the terrorists simply hated America for its freedom. Those who believed this tended to feel that war was the only answer -- war to punish the evildoers and war to rebuild foreign societies so they would be free and no longer resent us. Another answer given was that the terrorists, although murderous criminals, were exploiting genuine grievances that many people in Muslim countries had against U.S. foreign policy.

Osama bin Laden repeatedly stressed the major objections: The U.S. had been supporting apostate dictatorships in the Muslim world, given one-sided support to Israel, occupied holy land such as the Arabian Peninsula, and enforced brutal sanctions on the Iraqi people that had left hundreds of thousands of Muslims, mostly children, dead.

Americans are warned not to forget what happened eight years ago, but we must not assume history began on that date. Those in the Muslim world tend to have a much longer memory.

In 1953, the CIA helped to oust the once-democratically elected leader of Iran, a man who had been featured as Time Magazine's "Man of the Year" just a year before, and replaced him with the corrupt and brutal Shah, a dictator who ushered in a period of torture, terror and mass inflation. Twenty-six years later we saw the "blowback" -- a term the CIA uses to describe the unintended reaction from American policy abroad -- in the form of the Islamic Revolution. Iran fell under the grip of fundamentalists, but most of the nation would not rally against America for purely cultural reasons. What united them was resentment toward the U.S. meddling in their country.

Meanwhile, as part of the Cold War, the U.S. began supporting agitators in Afghanistan so as to incite a Soviet invasion and bring about an overstretch of the Soviet military. Although today most Americans think of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan at the time as purely defensive against Soviet belligerence, President Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted this was far from the case in a 1998 interview:

"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention."

These U.S.-allied Mujahideen in Afghanistan were championed as "freedom fighters," but many went on to form the basis of the Taliban and al Qaeda. The Taliban became one of the most brutal and backwards regimes on the planet, but as late as May of 2001, the U.S. was sending tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban to finance its war on opium...

***

Read the full article at: http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=213

Button, Button

The 1980s revival of the Twilight Zone series featured an episode entitled "Button, Button," based on a short story by sci-fi veteran Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, What Dreams May Come). In the story, a strange package arrives at the small apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Lewis, who appear to be about one bill away from relocating to a matching set of cardboard boxes. Mrs. Lewis opens the package and discovers that it contains a simple wooden box with a clear plastic lid overtop a large red button (the type of contraption teens might build in a high school woodshop class). Also included is a note advising that someone will be in touch to explain everything.

Later that afternoon, as promised, a mysterious, black-clad gentleman arrives at the apartment and presents Mrs. Lewis with an offer that proves both tempting and frightening. He informs her that she and her husband have two options with regard to the box:

1. Don’t push the button. The man will come back to reclaim the box. No gain, no loss. The end.

2. Push the button, after which two things will happen: "Someone whom you do not know will die. And afterward you will receive $200,000, tax-free."

The stranger then leaves to let the bewildered Mrs. Lewis think over her options.

That night, when Mr. Lewis comes home, the couple argue over whether the offer is real, and, if so, what to do about it. Mr. Lewis decides that it would be unconscionable to press the button, as it would result in murder. His wife disagrees; she wants to go for it. After all, what is the death of someone they don’t know? People die all the time, don’t they? "What if it was some old Chinese peasant, or someone with cancer?" she argues. "And what if it’s someone’s newborn baby?" her husband counters.

After a sleepless night and more arguing, Mrs. Lewis decides that she is owed this opportunity. She opens the box, looking as if she half expects it to bite her, and quickly presses the button. Nothing dramatic or ominous happens... at least not immediately. Later that afternoon, however, the mysterious man in black returns. He presents the Lewises with a briefcase full of cash, and reclaims his button box. Nervously puffing away on a cigarette, Mrs. Lewis asks if someone... "well, you know... " She’s unable to bring herself to say the word "died". "Of course," the man replies matter-of-factly. Then, when she asks him what will happen next, he looks into her eyes and says: "The button unit will be reprogrammed and offered to someone else, the same terms and conditions...I can assure you it will be offered to someone whom you don’t know."

Hardly a day passes when I don’t spend at least some time wondering how it is that America has gone from being a constitutional republic to more of a ‘people’s republic,’ and how much longer I’ll be able to discuss such questions in public before some heavily-armed civil servants kick my door in and haul me off to be shocked or waterboarded into correct thinking. And in considering these issues, I am convinced, now more than ever, that the premise of that old Twilight Zone episode speaks forcibly to the central aspect of our current problem.

It’s all about who we don’t know.

Think about it this way:

How many of the socialists that you see clamoring for more government programs and intervention on TV would, if offered the chance, walk into an average American home (assuming no 2nd Amendment deterrent, of course), raid all of the available wallets and purses in that home, and then go donate the money they confiscate to some charity or politically-correct cause? Can you see Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Barbara Boxer walking into someone’s living room and announcing: "We’re here to tell you what’s best for you and your family. We’ll decide what school your children will attend and what they’ll be taught there. We’ll decide what doctors you can see, what medications you can have, and whether or not you can try alternative treatments. We’ll decide what you can eat and how much of it you can have. We’ll decide what causes you will support with your money and how much you’ll give. We’ll decide how you should fit into society and which of your personal beliefs are a threat to society and should be suppressed. We’ll decide what privileges you will be allowed. And, oh, by the way, we’re also going to force you to maintain the system that will ensure that you abide by our directives. Any attempt to deviate from said directives will result in serious consequences."

Now, granted, there are people who would do things like this if they thought they could get by with it. By and large, however, most people would not. Why? Because confrontations such as what I’ve described above are personal. When you enter someone’s home, or otherwise spend time with them, you can attach a name and a face to them. You can see where and how they live, what difficulties they struggle with, what is dear to them, what their strengths and weaknesses are, what hopes and dreams they may have. Under such circumstances, they are individuals, and they are real to you as individuals. You may think that you know better than they do, but you’re not likely to tell them that, and you’re even less likely to try forcing your views on them.

But while this is generally the rule in individual situations, things change completely come election day, when we find ourselves in the voting both and that curtain swings shut behind us.

Consider an imaginary ballot, and a couple of typical voters:

Option 1 asks Joe Voter whether he favors raising the local sales tax to help pay for a new sports arena. What it’s also asking, albeit in a more subtle form, is whether Joe thinks that his friends and neighbors should have to sacrifice a little more every time they buy anything, so that Joe can get what he wants. But Joe never thinks of it this way. Bob, his next door neighbor, won’t pay the tax; "the city" will. Conveniently, "the city" has no distinct identity. It has no face. Joe doesn’t know "the city," so he feels no guilt in voting for Option 1 and raising Bob’s taxes. Besides, the old arena is a real eyesore; a new one would make Joe feel as if he lived in a more upscale community.

In the booth next to Joe, Barbara reads over Option 2, which asks whether the state’s blue laws should remain in effect, prohibiting the sale of general merchandise prior to 1:30 pm on Sundays. Barbara supports Option 2 because she hates commercialism in general and thinks that people need to slow down more. She and her family could always stay home on Sunday and let everyone else go about their business, of course, but she considers this a "family values" issue and therefore a matter of "what's best for everyone," regardless of whether "everyone" sees it that way or not. Besides, Barbara’s husband owns a car dealership, and if the other dealers were allowed to be open all day on Sunday, then her husband would either have to lose business to them or else open earlier than he would prefer.

We wear such amazingly effective political blinders, don’t we? It’s always "the city," "the county," "the state," or "the country," that pays for what we want and heels to our demands. Never Bob the struggling family man. Never Jill the single mom. Never anyone we know. Never anyone we have to explain ourselves to.

Such is the cold, impersonal ugliness of statism, and the subtle, de-humanizing way in which it works itself into our consciousness. Statists never stop to think about the individuals they harm because, politically speaking, individuals either don’t matter to them or else escape their notice. They consider themselves "big picture" people. They see only society itself, broken down into various competing subgroups to be crunched and graphed like so many numbers ("digital individuals," if you will). Civilization is their political blackboard, filled with social equations waiting to be brought into utopian balance. Statists never see Bob or Jill having to struggle harder to make ends meet because of some new tax. What they see is how nice a brand new stadium would look and how it might "advance the community as a whole." The tax Bob and Jill are forced to pay is just their "fair share" of "doing what’s right for the community," and if Bob and Jill object to it, they’re being "selfish" and "short-sighted." Statists never see Rick from down the street being denied a city contract and an opportunity to expand his business simply because he is not the right color or gender. Instead, what they see is someone who is the right color or gender being given that contract in order to "right past wrongs" done to a particular group, and Rick is assigned a portion of the blame for those wrongs, even though he may never have hurt, discriminated against, or otherwise "wronged" anyone in his life. Statists never see those who are turned down for operations, denied treatments, or else suffer and/or die while waiting for treatment while bureaucrats sedately dot their I’s and cross their T’s in the hubs of their vast, tax-based healthcare bureaucracies. All they can see is that they’re extending aid to yet another faceless group: "the unfortunate."

How easily we put on those robes and crowns. How casually we wield the scepters of little gods, passing out life and death, determining who is worthy of what and how much, deciding what’s right on the most intimate levels for people we don’t even know. We play our own version of the button game, day after day.

Press the button, get a guilt-free program. Some "wealthy" person, some privileged "winner of life’s lottery" will be the one to pay for it, right? Perhaps not, but what does that matter in the greater scheme of things? Press the button, get guilt-free social justice. Praise God, someone’s finally gonna pay! Who? Who cares? That’s beside the point, right? Press the button, get guilt-free regulation. After all, other people don’t always know what’s best for them, but we always know, don’t we? And best of all, when you regulate someone’s life from the privacy of the voting booth or the distance of the council room, you don’t have to put up with insolent questions like: "What right do you have to tell me how to live?" And you don’t have to get your hands dirty, either. Government agencies, police departments, and courts will do all the dirty work: hounding people, fining them, running them out of business, prosecuting them, jailing them, taking their children from them, and sometimes killing them. Most of the time, you’ll never even have to hear about it.

And so down the road we go, playing "button, button" with one another, always hoping to get something from someone we don’t know, or forcing them to live by the dictates of our conscience — never thinking that the button box will be reset and handed to someone who doesn’t know us, giving them their own chance to play God with us and the things we hold most dear.

Folks, we can launch all of the ad campaigns we want, hire the most riveting speakers we can find, and money-bomb the daylights out of the Ron Paul’s and Peter Schiff’s of the world, and we will still lose our freedoms until and unless we can make our fellow citizens see "the city," "the county," "the state," and "the country" as their friends, neighbors and co-workers. We must make them see that their acts of interference in the lives of others forge precedents by which those others are empowered to interfere in their lives. We must bring the cold, impersonal, ugly consequences of statism home in the most personal ways possible. We must make people see the button game for what it is, make them realize that when they step into the voting booth they’re making decisions that affect real people, and not always for the better. For starters, try getting those you know to ask themselves some of the following questions the next time they go to cast a vote:

1. Do I have the right — personally — to do what I’m about to ask government to do on my behalf? If not, how can I give my representatives power that I don’t even possess myself?
2. Would I want someone else to make this sort of decision for me?
3. Is getting my way on this issue worth having someone fined? Is it worth them losing their job? Is it worth sending them to prison? Would it still be worth it if I had to fine them, fire them, or imprison them myself? If not, why would I ask anyone else to do what I am not willing to do myself?
4. What precedent am I setting here? Would I want this sort of power in the hands of the politician or political group I fear the most? Does anyone out there think of me or the politicians and groups I support in that same way already?
5. If a program is supposed to give, what must it first take? From whom will it take it? Could I justify this if I had to face the person I’m voting to take it from?
6. If a program is supposed to provide an opportunity for someone, must it first take that opportunity from someone else? Could I justify taking it if I had to face the affected person?
7. If my community really wants to accomplish something, why must it forcefully collect money for it via taxation? Why can’t sufficient funds be raised privately, through voluntary means?

Some may argue that we shouldn’t "get personal" when it comes to politics, but what they fail to appreciate is that politics is already fundamentally personal. It’s impossible to interfere with the lives of individuals and not affect them personally. If we can make America see this, we can begin to turn the tide, but if not, then the war is lost already, and we’re all just sitting around waiting for our next turn with the button box... and dreading the idea of who may get it after us.