10 Tenets of Freedom

Fantastic list created by Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation, detailing 10 tenets of freedom. Excerpts from each tenet, read the entire 2-part article here:

Income Taxation

How can a person be considered truly free if the state has the power to take whatever percentage of income it wants from him? Whether the state sets the percentage at 5 percent or 100 percent, the principle remains the same: By wielding the power to set the percentage, the state effectively becomes the master of the people, who in turn become the servants.

Free Trade

From the standpoint of individual freedom, why shouldn’t people be free to trade their money and other property with others, anywhere in the world? It’s their privately owned property, right? It doesn’t belong to society, or to the majority, or to the state. They earned it. It belongs to them. By freely entering into trades with others from around the world, they are not only exercising an important right, they are also improving their economic lot in life.

Welfare

Repeal it all. No reforms. No modifications. No ridding the programs of waste, fraud, and abuse. Abolish every single program in which people receive largess from the government. That includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, education grants, food stamps, small-business loans, bailouts, and every other welfare-state program.

The welfare state has been a disaster for the American people. For more than a century, Americans were characterized by such values as self-reliance, independence, and voluntary charity. That was the era in which there were no paternalistic or socialistic programs.

Economic Regulations

Ditch them. Get rid of them all, including minimum-wage laws, price controls, rent controls, antitrust legislation, licensing laws, insider-trading laws, banking regulations, product-safety regulations, and stock regulations. In fact, the best thing would be to enact a constitutional amendment stating, “No law shall be passed respecting the regulation of commerce or abridging the free exercise thereof.”

Open Immigration

Why didn’t most 19th-century Americans consider open immigration to be unusual? Because they understood that the free movements of people across borders were simply another aspect of economic liberty and free markets, a philosophy that they were applying to other parts of American life.

Gun Control

It would have been more appropriate to have made the Second Amendment the first amendment to the Constitution. Without the right of the citizenry to keep and bear arms, the fundamental rights enumerated in the First Amendment are worthless. When the citizenry are well-armed, government officials tend to exercise caution in infringing such fundamental rights.

Civil Liberties

As our Americans ancestors understood so well, civil liberties protect the citizenry from arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, and punishment at the hands of government officials who are doing their best to quell dissent and criticism of wrongful government conduct.

The Drug War

After more than three decades of drug warfare and the ruination of countless people with drug problems, what do drug-war proponents have to show for their efforts? Nothing, except death, destruction, corruption, violence, and the ruination of countless lives... There is one — and only one — solution to this craziness: the legalization of drugs. The restoration of liberty in America necessitates an immediate end to drug-war prohibition.

The Monetary System

What would a free-market monetary system entail? The repeal of all legal-tender laws, the dismantling of the Federal Reserve System, and, best of all, a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a permanent separation of money and the state.

Militarism and Empire

The solution is simple: abandon all the foreign military bases, bring all the troops home, discharge them, close the bases here at home, discharge those troops, and rely on well-trained, well-armed citizen soldiers in the highly unlikely event that the United States is ever invaded by some foolish foreign regime.