4. adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
5. protection from unfair competition and monopolistic practices at home and abroad, for every business in America, large and small;
6. the ability of farmers and ranchers to raise and sell the the bounty of their lands at a return which will give themselves and their families a decent living;
7. protections from the fears attendant to old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
8. a good, quality education, sufficient for the needs of our modern society; an education that is ongoing if needed or desired.
One of the great lies that has been perpetrated on the American people for much of our nation's history is that there is only a finite amount of liberty to be divided up among the individual members of our society. This belief in a scarcity of liberty is completely baseless, and is being used by those who wish to be America's new class of aristocrats to drive us into the despair of powerlessness, and ration out liberty like a city rations water in the middle of a drought. Like love, liberty is a gift to be shared, that grows in the sharing, and is best limited by our own sense of responsibility. In theory, the only limits to our liberties should be those we impose upon ourselves. However, there are two difficulties with this utopian idea.
The first of these is, as I have pointed out in numerous articles in the past, the roughly four percent of our population--mostly men--who suffer from Antisocial Personality Disorder, i.e., sociopathy/psychopathy. As I pointed out in my 9 April 2014 OpEdNews article, "Governance Without Cynicism, Part 2," [Corrections and amplifications in brackets]:
"Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" of market forces is simply ineffective against its greatest enemy: the four percent of the population who are sociopaths. Martha Stout--former professor of clinical psychology at the Harvard School of Medicine--pointed out in her 2005 book, The Sociopath Next Door, and Professor Donald Black, MD--Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa Medical School--pointed out in his 2013 book, Bad Boys, Bad Men, Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder (Sociopathy), that not all sociopaths end up in prison. Some of them end up in corporate boardrooms, where their ruthlessness and lack of empathy, covered by a thin veneer of civilized behavior, makes them stars (Think of movies like Wall Street, or at its parody-level extreme American Psycho). Other corporate climbers, seeing the success of the sociopaths, emulate the sociopaths' behavior, so that a new and horrific normal for morality is set for the [American] corporate boardroom."
The second is very nearly the inverse of the first: human beings who have the perverse view that the best way to impose what they believe are "responsible" limits on themselves, is by first attempting to impose limitations on the liberties of others. This can include limiting others' ability to thrive within society by reducing their lives to mere existence, rather than lives that nurture and permit their developing their human potential to the fullest. Karl Marx, whose stated, underlying motive for his political-economic system was to maximize humanity's opportunity to maximize their personal growth and potential as human beings, wrote of this in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (pp. 120-121, 1844), which I quoted extensively in my 15 November 2012 OpEdNews article "Marxism for Fun and Profit." (Words in brackets are corrections and amplifications for the sake of clarity.):
"(1) By reducing the worker's need to the barest and most miserable level of physical subsistence, and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement; thus [the capitalist] says: Man has no other need either of activity or of enjoyment. For [the capitalist] declares that this life, too, is human life and existence."
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