Private property...

The American left would have you believe that government regulation of business are necessary because otherwise the corporate executives would virtually enslave the worker while rewarding himself in a tremendously disproportionate manner.

However, they believe that various government officials don't carry out the same income redistribution schemes, always to their own benefit, despite the fact that these very officials are they who carry out the investigations into possible criminal behavior. Are we to expect that these people will prosecute themselves?

No, and in the end, I'd rather take my chances on a limited government which protected the rights of people to operate in the free markets to secure our own well-being. At least in the market, I have the choice of employers and as a consumer I can speak with my purchasing habits.

When the government is allowed to pull the strings of the national economy, I have no ability to alter the course of the policies with which I must cope, other than to vote in elections managed by the state, use courtrooms overseen by the state, and oppose armies of lawyers funded limitlessly by the state.

How can any self-respecting American patriot consider this sort of massive fraud 'freedom'?

The simplicity of this dilemna can be seen easily if one considers the following:

Most of us know that if you buy a television, it is your property. If someone takes it away from you, he has committed the crime of theft or burglary.

Therefore, if that television is your property, whatever you traded for it must also be your property, for otherwise you would have had no right to trade it away as it would have belonged to someone other than yourself, and in that case you would be guilty of theft or burglary.

Usually, a person takes cash to a store and buys a television, therefore that cash must be his property. But where did he get that cash? Most likely he traded his labor to an employer who gave him cash in return.

Going one step further, a man's labor must belong to him for were it to belong to another, we would properly recongize that to be slavery, incorrectly thought to have been abolished by Abraham Lincoln after the Civil War.

So, while a man's labor is his property, so to is whatever he may be able to acquire in exchange for his labor. Just as I am able to use my cash for a television or a bicycle, so too may a man use his labor for what he wishes, or not at all.

In the case that he chooses to trade his labor for money, that money must belong to him in its entirety, because the labor belonged to him similarly in its entirety. However, nothing could be further from the mindset of the modern American who routinely accepts the claims laid upon the fruits of his labor by a government which requires him to forfeit his property in exchange for whatever services it wishes to provide, yet all the while not offering the man an opportunity to decline the offer of the government.

As it carries out this tyranny of punishing those who attempt to withhold their own property from thieves and pillagers, the government tells us all the while that this system is known as 'freedom'. I must conclude that our founding fathers would adamantly disagree.

As Michael Rozeff asks:

What sort of Republic would this be if it had been founded by the Bushes, Clintons, Kennedys, Bidens, and McCains?