29. To be or not to be….Dependent? That is the Question

The way I see it, there are 3 groups of people politically: one group wants to just
be allowed to live their lives; government’s role for them is for the protection
of their basic rights. The second group wants to control the lives and decisions
of everyone else. They tend to aspire to positions of power, including elected
office! The third group consists of those who don’t want to take responsibility for
their lives or decisions—they want to be provided for, and to be “given” security.
Unfortunately, the last 2 groups tend to get along quite well… at the expense of
the first group!

We have allowed our government to pay for more and more of our lifetime
expenses: welfare, aid to dependent children, Medicaid, medicare, social
security, food stamps. Unfortunately, the recipients have grown to forget that
most of these programs aren’t paid for by the “government”—they’re paid for
by other Americans. The government takes our hard-earned money, wastes a
bunch of it, divies up what’s left, and then makes us feel as if they’ve “given” us
something that we couldn’t have gotten on our own.

When we become dependent upon government for our basic life needs, we
simultaneously relinquish our freedoms to make our own decisions about those
lives. Benjamin Franklin said it perfectly: “Those who would sacrifice freedom for
security deserve neither.”

Such is the case with Obamacare. The Democrats who drafted and passed this
law have sold it to Americans as the ultimate version of “government taking care
of its people”. In reality, they are robbing us of our most basic constitutional
rights: liberty, property, religious freedom, perhaps even life. They are taking
freedom from 85% of our citizens in the name of “taking care of” 15%. Why are
we putting up with this???

Where in our constitution does it say that the government has the right to take
money from us to pay for institutions that only serve to make us increasingly
dependent on the one thing that the constitution was meant to protect us
from—our government?

(Note: This commentary is by Dr. Jill Vecchio.)