How Do We Protect and Preserve Our Liberty?
The U.S. government was established on the foundation that liberty must be protected and preserved from tyrannical forces who would seek to impose their will on the individual.
Thomas Jefferson described the term liberty in the Declaration of Independence as “unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”
In modern day, liberty is defined as “the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.”
Americans talk a lot about how to protect and preserve their liberty. People on both sides of the political aisle wish the same thing — for individuals to be endowed with all their natural rights. The challenge is over what the role of government should be in ensuring it.
For many, liberty means government keeping a light touch on how its citizens conduct their lives, businesses, and associations. Others argue that laws must be enacted to protect small groups of people who would otherwise be restricted to conduct their lives as they wish if left to conform to majority standards.
Self-determination is a key factor. So, is the role of government to ensure that all people are treated equally and free from societal encumbrances, or is the government’s role to guarantee that each individual has basic rights and it is up to the individual to exploit his or her own abilities to their fullest potential? Are these roles in contradiction, and why is it so difficult for the political left and right to agree on how to achieve liberty when they agree that it is a basic endowment?
TPOH explores the role and responsibility of government in ensuring liberty as it impacts Americans’ ability to work, express their faith, conform to regulations and policies, express their personal rights, experience physical security, explore opportunities, and pursue their mental and physical health.
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The media are not the only ones with this responsibility. Anybody who has influence over any number of people is aware of the impact of their words. Words matter, and saying certain things can have unforeseen consequences.
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The quintessential image of an austere college campus usually involves students walking across the quad with colorful leaves falling in the background. Their backpacks are heavy with books, or maybe the students are carrying a particularly thick text as they try waving their hands, engaged in heated discussion, moving as if floating on a cloud of intellectual stimulation.
Yet, you’d be wrong to think these imagined discussions are expressing any diversity of thought. That’s not what’s happening on these campuses, according to the Heterodox Academy, which ranked 200 schools on how much viewpoint diversity one can expect to find.
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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has “generally recognized as safe” pharmaceutical grade PG, which is what is used in vaping.
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The Always Entertaining State GDP Map Is Back
University of Michigan-Flint Economics Professor Mark Perry annually produces a very helpful visual tool: a state GDP map that compares how each U.S. state’s economy matches up to a corresponding country of equal output.
It’s a great way to see how enormous the United States’ GDP is compared to the rest of the world.
FCC Website Crash Doesn’t Free the Internet
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Who’d a thunk it? All the bloviating and hyperventilating and name-calling aside, turns out President Trump’s foreign policy actions in the first 100 days of his presidency (an entirely artificial edifice on which to judge a presidency) are pretty …...
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America has become a nation of homebodies. And it’s not doing the economy, or America’s urban centers, a lot of good.
The ‘Go West, young man!’ ethic knitted into America’s DNA has apparently been lost on the young people. In fact, the few people who are moving around the country are retirees, not the scrappy young upstarts looking for a great new opportunity.
Helping Communities With Large Populations of Ex-Prisoners
Though the U.S. recidivism rate is as high as 50-75 percent within five years, suggesting many of the same people end up in prison more than once, about 650,000 men and women are released from prison every year. They are returned to the communities from where they came with slightly less than what they had when they first went in, except now, they’re stigmatized, have less chance of getting a job, and few skills to keep up with changing educational requirements and work environments.
Taxes are Too High: How Does Reducing Tax Rates Affect You?
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Innovation Not Transformation: A Return to Weapons Technology
While America’s military leaders have been busy with trying to build a strategy of “transformation,” scientists and engineers have been quietly working on some pretty cool weapons technology that sounds like it comes straight out of sci-fi. And though development has been slow to yield applicable products, defense and security policy analyst Tom Donnelly is clearly optimistic about some recent breakthroughs.
