As you may have guessed, I love freedom. For the most part everyone thinks they love freedom too. But wait…most people who say they like freedom don’t mean it.
Freedom means not only doing your own thing but being cool with other people doing their own thing. Folks usually can’t resist bossing other people around. Freedom means a neighbor who doesn’t mow his lawn…right next door to the lawn Nazi who obliterates dandelions on sight. It means nervous doctors watching yahoos without helmets BASE jumping. It means risk taking BASE jumpers co-existing with pale gutless doctors who get the vapors playing golf. It means the Prius hyper-miler getting passed by a displacement laden ’69 Plymouth Barracuda. It means some guy with spandex shorts painted on his ass might be pedaling a bicycle when you want to goose that Plymouth’s accelerator.
Freedom means you don’t get to call the shots for anybody but yourself.
A person needs self control, honesty, and a metric shit-ton of humility to let other folks do something they themselves wouldn’t do. And when we fail busybody assholes get their hooks in.
Og says it better.
Indeed it is. I’d like to add a Curmudgeonly corollary about regulations and laws:
“For every regulation you propose, imagine your worst enemy enforcing it.”
“Imagine your worst enemy is having a bad day. Imagine your worst enemy has the police and military at his disposal. Plus an unlimited budget to hire amoral lawyers. Suppose he hasn’t has his morning coffee, hasn’t been laid in a decade, his car was stolen this morning, his daughter just eloped to Botswana with a crossdressing unemployed mime, his dog peed on his shoe, and he just got kicked in the balls…then imagine him applying the regulation to you…good and hard.”
That is the mental image that will reduce regulation nationwide. Eco-statists (is that a word?) would propose a lot fewer regulations if they imagined that Dick Cheney, Darth Vader, and a maniacal blogger named Curmudgeon got together to run the EPA and also enforce every Federal regulation whenever and however we saw fit. Especially me because I’ve got a playful sense of humor and enjoy irony. Imagine the games I could play!
“If you made the hammer; it’s your fault when you get pounded by it.”