THE NANNY STATE

People traveled to America’s wide open spaces to create economic opportunity for themselves, escape religious persecution, and live a life they couldn’t possibly have imagined living in their homelands, a life of freedom and opportunity. From sea to shining sea they tamed what once was harsh, unforgiving wilderness, blazed trails across dangerous land, planted stakes in the ground that symbolized that most precious of commodities, land they could call their own.

There they built cabins, then towns, then cities, then skyscrapers. There they created the most liberty-based government known to man, a government that encouraged, nay required rugged individuals, acting in their own self-interest, to work hard in order to prosper, so that their communities would prosper in kind.

As with all good things, it was not to last forever.

Human government has a history of running in cycles. Like the rise of the Roman Republic and the birth of America hundreds of years later, new forms of self-government are often born from man’s yearning for freedom. After that initial birth, a golden age follows, with dramatic increases in inventions and prosperity. The golden age may last a couple hundred years, but it inevitably ends. People begin to grow complacent and, generation by generation, more and more decadent, lazy, content. Instead of traditional self-reliance, they want someone to take care of them. Instead of freedom, they want security.

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