Happy Independence Day!

This holiday has been steadily rising in my mental “Favorite Holidays” list as my love for my country has grown. Sometimes I wish I didn’t love the USA as much as I do. It’s frustrating to love something flawed, especially when you feel like if only the world would listen to you, you could fix it all up to perfection.

Of course, I know I couldn’t fix it perfectly, even if everybody would do what I said, because I’m not perfect. What’s more, if the world listened to me, that would mean I was the absolute dictator of the world and that completely contradicts what I would be trying to do in the first place: fix the USA’s problems. Her problems break my heart. Abortion, specifically.

The USA is flawed. Every country in the world is flawed. What makes the USA special is the idea it is founded on.

Humans are basically evil. Not basically good. Evil. The US government is set up to protect us from ourselves by letting us be free. To let us be free. We are supposed to be free to be prosperous, but I’d like to point something out that gets overlooked: originally, we were also free to be idiots and fail, but more and more we’re trying to stop that freedom to fail. The remedy is, supposedly, big government. I humbly point out that this isn’t working.

The US government is here for two things: to protect us, the people, and to protect our property. That’s it. Nothing more.

We are not a democracy. We are a Constitutional Republic. Yes, there is a difference. A democracy is where everything is jointly decided by the people themselves. A republic is where We the People elect representatives to decide things for us. A Constitutional Republic is where the representatives are bound to obey the Constitution that the Republic is founded on.

The Constitution that we are supposed to be obeying has a tenth amendment that states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”. If the Constitution doesn’t say you can do it, Federal Government, then you can’t. That's why our military is constitutional and universal health care isn't.

It’s these basic principles that are being ignored, and ignoring these basic principles is what is messing our country up.

It would be nice if government could take care of us. Government can take care of us. But there is something you have to give up in return.

When you are a toddler, your parents take care of you. They make sure you were safe and regulate how many cookies you can have and how much sleep you get. When you become an adult, you make your own decisions. You can make great decisions by looking both ways when you cross the street and regulating your own cookie intake and sleeping hours...or you can make poor decisions and pay for it with declining health. You're free to do whichever you choose.

Even if you make poor decisions occasionally, you don’t want to safeguard against poor decisions by having your parents always make your decisions for you. For one thing, that would take away all your freedom. For another, your parents are flawed too.

This is what big government is: flawed parents who aren’t always looking out for your best interests. Do you want to be a toddler and have the government babysit you, or do you want to take responsibility for your own life and sometimes fail along the way?

Happy Independence Day! Let's celebrate Freedom!