Government has increasingly shifted from a focus on protecting basic rights to attempting to reshape society without regard for individual choice.
What do carbon taxes, draconian covid-19 restrictions, and internet censorship have in common?
They are all policies pursued by those who fear freedom.
Not their own freedom of course.
No, even the most statist politicians believe that they should be personally able to travel freely, speak their minds, and accumulate wealth.
But it’s the freedom of others that those in power increasingly seem to fear.
An arrogant and elitist mindset
The thing is, there is no way to to be afraid of the freedom of others unless you think you are better than them.
And that is exactly what many of our politicians clearly think about those they are supposed to serve.
Politicians like Justin Trudeau think they should be able to fly around the world, live in big homes, accumulate wealth and influence, all the while imposing policies that make it tougher for everyone else to achieve the same thing.
That’s the kind of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ attitude that we have seen time and time again in this country.
Think of all the politicians who travelled while lecturing others to “stay home, say lives!”
Think of the fact that we were told “we’re all in this together” as politicians imposed shutdowns that ruined countless lives, while still collecting their full paycheques.
Think about the supposedly impending climate disaster we are told necessitates ‘sacrifices’ from all of us, even as many of our politicians and elites continue to have a massive carbon footprint.
And, think about how when regular people start complaining about this and noticing how hypocritical everything is we see a rapid move towards internet censorship – supposedly for our ‘safety.’
Government should protect our rights and freedoms
The basic idea of government in Western civilization is that it focuses on basic tasks: National defense, some national infrastructure, a shared legal system, and the defense of the rights and freedoms of Citizens.
Yet, more and more we see politicians who want our government to be a tool for reshaping society to fit into the ‘ideal’ image of those in power, rather than making room for the individuality and creativity that lets societies change and develop on their own.
The first response of so many of those in power is to react out of fear, trying to control, limit, and restrict our rights and freedoms, placing their own views above our own.
The political and media establishment has even tried to make ‘freedom’ out to be a controversial word, when it should be the guiding principle of everyone who seeks to hold government office.
There’s a reason that tyrannical governments such as those in China and Russia fear freedom, because free people won’t just go along with the obsessions of those in power. Freedom is demonized in those places, precisely because those who seek unaccountable power know that the freedom of the populace stands in their way.
So, when we see politicians in this country try to demonize the idea of freedom, or try to make freedom into something ‘controversial,’ we should see that for what it is: An attempt to take away our power and concentrate it in fewer and fewer hands.
The trend of politicians in this country casting freedom as something dangerous or negative is deeply un-Canadian, and must be rejected by all of us.
Spencer Fernando
Photo – YouTube
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