Understanding Liberty by Robert Socha

Do we value Liberty? Do we even understand what Liberty is? Have material pleasures numbed our senses where we willfully submit to the burdens placed on us by those we’ve elected to office as long as the creature comforts we’ve come to enjoy and expect remain?

I have tended toward this expectation that I deserve anything. Although I have never signed up for governmental assistance programs, be their food stamps or rental assistance, etc., I have reached out to friends and neighbors and humbly asked for help.

In 2012 when President Obama was running for reelection, our dinner table discussion focused on the election cycle’s political aspects. My 11-year-old son, at the time, asked me, “Dad, why aren’t you voting for President Obama?” (Significantly, he did not ask who I was voting for.) I replied, “I am not voting for President Obama because he wants to take my neighbor’s money and our money through taxation, through the threat of confiscation at the end of a gun, through the IRS and other entities, and apply that money to things at his and the government’s discretion. I am opposed to that. I don’t think it’s right for the government to redistribute wealth.” Astutely, my son replied, “but dad, people have given us money.” I said, “Yes, son, but those people gave to us freely, out of the goodness of their hearts and the generosity of their treasure. Nothing forced them to help us. The overwhelming need compelled them to action.”

As I said above, there was a time that I had to humble myself and ask for help. I did not go to my governmental representatives and ask them to give me money out of the public trough. I went to my church, my friends, my family, and my neighbors. Surprisingly, supernaturally, they generously gave us treasure from their own pockets and helped our family through an arduous financial struggle! These philanthropic efforts are a gigantic foundational stone having built these United States and make these United States the most benevolent country the world has ever known. Philanthropy can propel us to a future where over-taxation does not encumber!

I understand the current necessity to invoke property taxes as a method for funding local municipalities. They are invariably immoral. Unfortunately, our selfish nature has usurped public-spiritedness, conceding us to submit to taxation naturally. It is profusely upsetting that I will never truly own my house because of property taxes. If I don’t pay those property taxes, the city will come and foreclose or put a lien on my house or put it up for tax auction. All my investment into my property notwithstanding, that I lose my home if I choose not to pay my property taxes is something we’ve come to take as typical and expected. It is the antithesis to private property rights, which are one of the tenants that our founders believed would make a free people genuinely free!

“A reading of the important founding documents, however, shows clearly that the Founders held property rights to be as important as other human rights. In fact, at times they insisted that the right to acquire and possess private property was in some ways the most important of individual rights.” taken from The Primacy of Property Rights and the American Founding, by David Upham.

It is immoral for us to continue to raise property taxes and expect these property and income taxes to fund the systems of government we have in place. The federal government’s corruption sending United States citizens’ money overseas has been perpetuated long enough and must cease immediately! I am endeavoring at the local level to find a solution that will necessarily eliminate, or at least significantly reduce, property taxes in my little city. Hopefully, celestial fires of Liberty will burn in the hearts of men stimulating assistance in this endeavor; I can’t do it alone.

My voice matters. Our voices matter! As a mighty throng endeavoring to hold our elected officials accountable and whole and keep the government treasury’s coffers within its constitutional expenditures, we must act! My city, my country, deserves to be served by thrifty representatives willing to explore options for funding government that are not a direct burden on the people. Just because we’ve become a custom to carry this burden for the last 110 years or so does not mean that it must continue forevermore. Save we must be austere and philanthropic, and we must persevere until the fulfillment of the funding can adequately remove the burden from the average taxpayer.

I hope and expect that the good people of my hometown and the good people of these United States can buckle up and return to Liberty.