Choose

What does freedom mean?
If you had to explain to someone what freedom is how would you start? would you tell them that freedom is the ability to make all the right decisions? Would you tell them how its the ability to have someone else not only show you whats right but also force your hand to make sure you had no choice but to do what is right?
Is it freedom when you are isolated from the consequences of your actions?

I don't know first hand what the rest of the people in this world have lived or experienced, I wont pretend to be able to divine what is the absolute best decision for every individual on this planet but I don't think that I have to either. this world is far from perfect, everyday we see the news and we hear about people starving or being killed, we hear about abused children and single mothers, we hear about evil that seems to the have been set to reign free of any effective system to control it and we sit back and feel with our heart of hearts that we should be looking at new ways to set things straight. We get our calculator and discover that if we only did this one thing here we could save this percentage of the population, that if we could find a way to regulate that over there we could make so many people happier than they are at current.
We know that if we could force people to make certain choices we could improve the statistics we could potentially save lives and help people live longer or potentially better lives.
Its wrong.
So many people look at the statistics on poor people in this country and conclude that people are poor and that is the problem, I don't think that is the problem I think its the symptom of a problem. People today look at the number of poor people today and say society has the means to pay those people so we should force those who can pay to send the people with less money a little more, they look at the number of people who cant go to college and the make a program that uses taxes or takes form the populace to pay for the less fortunate, they focus in on health care and mandate that every person pay so that no one is left with medical expenses they can't afford, they move on over to elderly people and insure that society pays to make sure they get a secure retirement. Its been a pattern for over a hundred years now and it does not look like its going to stop any time soon, we see a problem and set in motion a program that "fixes" that problem and never stop to think about the cause of the problem. I think its a bit like living on a ship with water coming in, we see that the water level is so high that we can't eat our meals at the table and the solution is to build a higher deck that is above the water level, we have people building new staircases and no one is even thinking about finding the leak. Its a problem that we can put off for a while but there comes a time when the higher we build the more it adds to the problem. That's not freedom.
We keep looking at the foundation of this country and saying to ourselves "yeah that was good but we can do better now, we have a better understanding and improved technologies we can make a better country than what they could have ever dreamed" but we fail to include the one factor that has been the biggest battle for any nation in this worlds history: Human nature.
The reason they set as few regulation and in turn as few systems to take care of people as they did is because they understood that freedom is the only way to save people. It does not insure that every person is protected from harm or bad decisions but it was never meant to. They knew enough about human nature to realize that you can't force people to save themselves but you can give people the best chance at solving there own problems by insuring freedom. They new that people isolated from the consequences of their choices never learn and that when you give to people without requiring some sort of payment you cheapen the worth of what is given.
I know that we have experts that can give statistics on how many people we can save with this program or that program but he basis is flawed because we think that we can somehow improve the outcome by removing personal responsibility (Liberty).
We need the opportunity to fail now and again to insure that we learn, the real prize that was won at the birth of this nation was not a chance to insure happiness to every citizen but rather the chance to insure that if we choose to, we can find happiness.
I wish that I could put the feelings I have into words but they never come out right so lets try this: There are some very basic truths when dealing with the human element and when the answer does not take them into consideration you can be assured that it is not an answer at all.

When you sell something for nothing it will, in the end be worth nothing.

If you take away the consequences of peoples actions you take away the chance of people learning from those actions.

When you try to force people to be better you will assuredly make them worse.

And when you take away personal responsibility you take away any chance for people to be truly happy.

If we are taking away the ability for people to choose for themselves what their future holds then we are taking away the chance for people to ever be free. Its not about ensuring that people make the right choice its about making sure that they have the right to choose.