Individual Liberty- Concerning America

 As promised, we will now go into those five principles that we discussed in my hub, Who are we America.  The first of these principles is individual liberty.  This is one of the two most important principles of America.  I discuss this one first because it is something that each and everyone of us can control.  I suppose that you could describe this as a positive liberty.  A positive liberty is defined as having the power and resources to act as one's potential.  There is something that we need to make sure we understand right from the start is that there really is some controversy that involves positive liberties, which we will go into a little further down after we understand what exactly is a positive liberty.

 A positive liberty as stated more succintly is the ability of the individual to choose.  The individual has the right to choose what he wants to do in life.  This means that he is in a state where his is controlled by no one thing, like an addiction.  It can also be described as self-mastery.  Positive liberty can have a very great opportunity potential.  If man is albe to control the forces of his mind, body, and other such things that would not allow himself to choose the path he wants, he will be able to do great things.  Where we get in trouble with positive liberties is when, as a free human, we choose the path that would lead to the destruction of others.  If we secure our positive liberty just to destroy another's, in essence we have destroyed it in ourselves also because someone will come along and take ours.  If we open ourselves up as a country to take one's rights away to allow someone else to have a liberty that we just had taken away from us.  This is the controversy that I was talking about in the earlier section.  In America today, we have taken positive liberty to mean a sort of social justice.  Some might take this the wrong way, but things like affirmative action are examples of the taking the rights away from a group and telling them that they have to choose this person because of their gender or race.  True positive liberty does not say, "This is what you are going to do because we have to give everyone the equal chance of success."  Instead, it would say that we need to allow everyone the right or chance to choose if they are going to choose to be successful.  If we take the right to choose away from people it is a dangerous thing for a truly free society; in fact, it makes it nonexistant. 

The person, to be free, must master himself. If he is unable to do so, something else will always choose his path. As Americans in recent years, people have been greatly encouraged to live on credit, and so almost all of America is enslaved. We are enslaved to those who hold our debt for us. We work to pay off the houses we bought on credit, the vacations we take, and even our government cannot act in its best interest because it owes too much money to too many people. The government, though, is just an example of what its peoples have become. Governments are always, only as good as those citizens that run it. So if the people that run the government do not know how to govern themselves, which is essentially what individual freedom is, how could we expect the government to be able to govern itself?

Being free individually is not an easy road. That is why we have so many people who depend on our government for help. It is much easier for a person to allow someone else to tell them how to live, and what to do. But is that really the American spirit? Are Americans that weak that we want the government to tell us that we should depend on them? Or should we, as true Americans, stand up and demand that we are better than this? For me, I know that it is better that I choose my own path and destiny. I will not allow someone else to decide it for me. If I fail in my choices, then I fail on my own accord, and no one elses choice. But, if I succeed, then I have no one else who will say that I couldn't have done it without them. Will you choose to be free? Or will you choose to let someone else choose for you? As a nation, we once chose the former, but in recent years we have chosen the latter. With this has come perilous times for our nation. We are at the tipping point as a nation. If you wish to be free, and to continue in freedom, you must first choose to be individually free. If you choose individual freedom, you are, in fact, making the most important first choice that will lead towards your individual freedom.