I Got Beer, Bourbon And Cigars…..Mind If I Join Ya?
It’s an old and worn out line, but I’ll use it anyway…
I wasn’t born in North Carolina, but I got here just as fast as I could!
I fully buy into the idea that North Carolina is God’s country. And while that’s true, if God wants to get away from it all and take a vacation, he makes his way to Minnesota. Archibald Graham said it best:
[It] is my most special place in all the world. Once a place touches you like that, the wind never blows so cold again.
I was born and raised in Minnesota. I graduated high school, then college and went on to teach school never moving more than 2 hours from my home town. I grew up a good social liberal; fair wages, equal rights and the son of a union man. Through it all, I found myself a Republican. And looking back now, I suppose I was a Republican the same way you are a Ford man, or a John Deere man. Or a Vikings fan. You’re born to a Republican parent.
At the time, it was hard to rationalize the dichotomy that was my liberal republican self. While attending college at the University of Minnesota I traveled to Mexico to build houses for immigrants waiting for their papers to be processed. I remember feeling that the whole process was distinctly distasteful and unfair. However, even then, my liberal boundaries had bounds; I refused to agree to smuggle an individual back to Minnesota in our van.
After leaving the U of M to attend a smaller state school the transformation began. It was while at this small state school that we invaded Iraq the first time. I found myself, surprisingly, defending the action and resisting my fellow “long haired hippies”. This transformation continued. After graduating with a math degree, I began to teach in a small little town along the “Banks of the Plum Creek”. My one and only year as a teacher was a “union negotiation year”. The making of that sausage was enough for me. I quit the job and, as it would turn out, the profession. My liberalist self began to change form. The fair wage union lover was gone forever.
I now work in corporate America in a happy if not distinguished career. My political interests would never have been awakened but for the intersection of two politicians: Barack Obama and Mike Munger. Both were political newbies that had little to no experience managing anything or holding public office. History will tell us that one of them was successful in his election, the other much less so.
Mr. Obama ignited my passion. Mr. Munger gave it direction. You see, it was Mr. Munger that described himself as a Libertarian:
A social liberal. A fiscal conservative.
It was the combination of those two men that brought to where I am today. I’m no more qualified to be a writer than Obama is to be President. It didn’t stop him, why should it me? And so here I am, in vehement opposition of the Democrats. All while trying to survive as a recovering Republican. My journey to NC took me all over, Seattle to Arizona, back to Minnesota and finally here.
My goal? I only hope to make you think through your position. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll find yourself like I find myself; a long haired hippie working in corporate America livin’ the Libertarian dream.
With that said, I wanna go into what I think defines the claassic – liberal thinking. Remember, not so long ago, government was dominated by dictators; kings and potentates that dominated the lives of the people in virtually every way. You were born a thing, you grew up that thig and you died that thing. This be farmer, herder or baker. Life was dreary with little to no hope of getting less dreary.
Then came the concept of Liberty. A concept that, frankly, we take for granted these days. The idea that a man exits, before he is defined by government, in Liberty. For a very long time I looked for words that could describe this concept; not long ago I found them:
Nature, or rather God, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life; elements, each of which is rendered complete by the others, and that cannot be understood without them. For what are our faculties, but the extension of our personality? and what is property, but an extension of our faculties?
If every man has the right of defending, even by force, his person, his liberty, and his property, a number of men have the right to combine together to extend, to organize a common force to provide regularly for this defense.
Collective right, then, has its principle, its reason for existing, its lawfulness, in individual right; and the common force cannot rationally have any other end, or any other mission, than that of the isolated forces for which it is substituted. Thus, as the force of an individual cannot lawfully touch the person, the liberty, or the property of another individual—for the same reason, the common force cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, the liberty, or the property of individuals or of classes.
We indeed, posses inalienable rights, bestowed up on us by Benevolent Providence, that are ours before the State.
Tags: frederic bastiat, The Law
