Free Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom by Ron Paul Page B

pages. The authorities found out and he was arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned. His father’s request to me was to get the prison officials to allow his son to take his hormonal medications that he had been dependent on since birth. This needless prohibition made the situation much worse for the prisoner and devastated his family. He never committed an act of violence and had no real understanding of the “crime” he committed, but a lot of money was spent investigating, trying, and imprisoning an individual who was no threat to anyone. Surely a free society can distinguish between a crime of producing and distributing child pornography and happening across random images on a digital delivery system. Surely we can grant that the producer is the problem here, not the casual web surfer.
    The majority, or what people see as the majority, or even just what people perceive as conventional wisdom, now defines what rights are: What people want, demand, need, or wish for can be declared a right by merely writing a law. This breeds coalition building and incestuous bipartisanship where various groups get together and push for their handouts. That’s why the loot is passed out to the special interest groups in the “pork barrel.”
    A precise definition and understanding of what our rightsare would prevent this. Since both the rich and the poor endorse this principle, they share in the benefits. Trouble is, the poor are deceived into believing taxes on the rich will serve their interest. The rich, symbolized by the Goldman Sachs elite, end up the winners in the scramble to sit at the table where the “free lunch” is served.
    Some say that members of Congress should listen to the people and vote accordingly. Listening to the people when they are right makes sense, but if the majority of the people demand unconstitutional and immoral transfer programs, the member of Congress has an obligation to live up to his or her oath of office and campaign promises. If ten thousand people in a district can be organized to demand that a member of Congress support a special handout, and the rest of the people in the district are apathetic and pay no attention to the lobbying effort of a pressure group, “listening to his constituents” would invite legalized looting (as it already has).
    Even if a true majority of a district demanded support for unconstitutional spending, the rule of law is undermined if the member of Congress complies with the demands. Unfortunately, that’s what has been happening for a long time. The “will of the people” is being invoked to pass unconstitutional measures. The majority (all the various interest groups) gangs up on the minority as it rewrites the rules that were supposed to have been written in the Constitution to constrain the arbitrary dictatorial powers of the government, the majority, and the special interests. The result is that pure democracy replaces the supposedly strict restraints placed in the Constitution on the ability of the majority to rule at will. This limitation on the power of the federal government was putthere with the belief that “their just powers” were only those consented to by the governed.
    Nineteenth-century lawyer Lysander Spooner carried this argument one step further. He believed that only a “few” consented. 1 Therefore, the Constitution should not apply to those who did not give their personal consent to cede any personal liberty (power) to the state. This is an interesting argument, but it’s not likely to make much headway at this stage in our history. Enforcing the Tenth Amendment is a big enough challenge to us for now.
    Today, as a result of our careless thinking, our desire for government assistance, and the emphasis on unearned economic benefits over free markets and self-reliance, we have a society made up of various special interest groups demanding their “rights.”
    My guess is that the majority of Americans believe that citizens—especially