David McElroy

The next man to be inaugurated president of the United States is going to be Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. If you’re one of those counting on elections to bring change to this country, this realization should be a wake-up call. Americans want big government.

It’s been clear for some time that Romney would win the GOP nomination, but the obvious became pretty widely accepted Tuesday when Rick Santorum dropped out of the race. (Ron Paul and New Gingrich remain in the race, but anyone who thinks at this point that either of them has even the slightest chance of being the nominee is delusional or doing drugs. Sorry.)

So now that we know what the choice for the fall is going to be, what does it tell us? It tells us that we have another choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, between a Republicrat and a Demopublican. It tells us that nothing is going to change in this country. It tells us that Americans want big government and are going to keep electing people to give it to them.

My optimistic friends tell me that “freedom is popular” and that “The People want their country back,” but they’re fooling themselves. The rhetoric of freedom is popular. People love to talk about freedom and responsibility. They just don’t want anybody to actually implement it.

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A week from today, millions of Americans will rush to post offices to mail last-second tax returns to the IRS. Many of them will grumble about what they’re having to pay, but most will accept the process as legitimate. They believe it’s moral for governments to take money from us.

I’ve said before that taxation is theft, but this is a good time of year to revisit the question. Most people have never even questioned the morality of taxation. They were brainwashed from an early age into believing that they owe unquestioning obedience to the governments that rule over them. They were taught to love the national government — and the things they were taught confused them into believing that loving the land in which they were born was the same as loving a government.

If you’ve been taught to be “patriotic” and love your country — and if you’ve been taught that your country is “the best in the world” — it’s natural that you’d grow up trusting the national myths you were taught. And even when you got old enough to realize that politicians are lying to you and are leading the country down the wrong path, it doesn’t occur to most to question the basic system. For the most part, people just start believing the fiction that dishonest politicians have hijacked the pristine and holy system that was handed down by the Founding Fathers.

In other words, it never crosses the mind of most that the problem might be that coercive government is flawed and immoral as a basic idea.

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Free speech isn’t very popular. It might be enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but that doesn’t mean most people like allowing it. That also doesn’t mean that the courts haven’t found ways to limit speech when they want to.

I heard a snippet of an interview on a TV news show Saturday while I was in a restaurant. The interviewer and a guest were talking about something untrue that one side had said of the other in a political battle between Democrats and Republicans. The interviewer seemed aghast at the blatant dishonesty.

“Shouldn’t it be illegal for them to say this since it’s not true?” he asked.

If you did a poll, I suspect a majority would agree with the interviewer, but that’s because they haven’t thought through the alternative to allowing unfettered free speech. If political dishonesty were declared illegal, who’s to judge what’s true? When two sides see the world in a different way, is one of them lying? And what about unpopular positions? Are those who warn that the mainstream is enslaving them guilty of telling lies?

And this brings us to anonymous speech. It’s come to be accepted today that a person who wants to engage in political speech is required to put his name on the piece. Ironically, using this standard, the collection of articles that successfully advocated for the adoption of the U.S. Constitution — the Federalist Papers — would be illegal today. It was accepted as an obvious right of free speech to hide your identity at the time, but those of the progressive left decided that’s not a good idea. So those who want to express their opinions are required to do it in a way that the money is essentially traceable in some way.

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