What is this election really about: freedom or a managed life?

This is what the election is about: whether we still think we can run our own lives, or whether we admit that a small group in Washington can plan those lives better than we can

There isn’t a left and a right. There’s an up and a down. Up is a free person under law. Down is the managed life: scored, subsidized, surveilled, and told what you may say. Good intentions don’t change the direction.

Too many people see someone with more and someone with less and decide the first stole from the second. So the answer is always more government. If that plan worked, after sixty years we’d hear progress: fewer people on aid, smaller programs. That isn’t what happened. The programs grew. The budgets grew.

Official poverty still covers more than thirty million people. Food aid, Medicaid, housing, disability, and tax credits cost trillions across federal, state, and local government.

You cannot buy safety from missiles, hacks, or cheap goods made by people who aren’t free by telling a billion people under dictatorship to sit tight while we deal with their masters. Hamilton was right: a country that prefers disgrace to danger is ready for a master, and has earned one. There is one guaranteed path to peace, and it takes a second: surrender.

Government works for the people. It has no power except what the public lends it. That idea is written into the Constitution: power starts with the people, not with the state and not with a class of experts who claim to speak for them. Every wannabe dictator hates it, because a country that believes that cannot be owned from the top down cannot be controlled. It was a dangerous idea 250 years ago. It is still a threat today, which is why the people who want to manage you spend so much time trying to make you forget it. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.
What is this election really about: freedom or a managed life?
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