Resource for Your Source: TheMes of Jack
Share my Values?
Freedom & Responsibility
Peace & Prosperity
This video expresses perhaps most accurately my understanding of where Humanity stands now. Although it is too "adolescent" in its exhortatory style, nevertheless, it speaks the truth about Personally Responsible Freedom. Heed and be Free.
This is Jack, the man who would be a reliable and valuable Resource for your Source.
Perhaps the book that best explains my philosophy of Personally Responsible Freedom is "The Market for Liberty" by Morris and Linda Tannehill. These quotes from their book succinctly and accurately articulate my core values:
"Rights are not a gift of God or of society; they are the product of the nature of man and of reality. If man is to live a productive and happy life and realize his full potential as a human being, he must be free from coercion by other men. The nature of man demands that he must have values and goals in order to live--without them, human life is impossible.
When a man is not free to choose his own goals, he can't act on the feedback from his behavior and so he can't correct his errors and live successfully. To the extent that a man is forcibly prevented by others from choosing his own values and goals, he is a slave. Slavery is the exact opposite of liberty; they cannot coexist.
"Rights pertain only to individual men. There is no such thing as minority rights, States' rights, 'civil' rights, or any other form of collective rights. The initiation of force against the collective is really the initiation of force against the individuals of which the collective is composed, because the collective has no existence apart from the individuals who compose it. Therefore, there are no collective rights--there are only the rights which every individual has to be free from the coercive actions of others.
"Morally, each man owns himself, and he has the right to do any thing which does not violate another man's right of self-ownership. The only way a right can be violated is by coercion. This is why society in harmony with the requirements of man's nature must be based on the rule of non-initiation of force--it must be a laissez-faire society. Laissez faire means 'Let people do as they please,' meaning, let everyone leave others alone to do as they choose. A laissez-faire society is a society of non-interference--a mind-your-own-business, live-and-Iet-live society. It means freedom for each individual to manage his own affairs in any way he pleases . . . not just in the realm of economics but in every area of his life.
"Can men ever achieve a laissez-faire society? Many people have an unshakable conviction that anything so 'ideal' could never be come a practical reality. They can't explain why they're so sure of this; they just feel an unreasoned 'certainty' that it must be so. What is behind this reasonless 'certainty' that the good (liberty) is unachievable? The answer lies in the inverted 'morality' of tradition--altruism. Altruism is the philosophical doctrine which holds that anything which is done out of concern for the welfare of others is good but that it is evil if motivated by concern for self. Some variation of this doctrine has been a basic part of nearly all of the world's religions and philosophies for man's entire history. Altruism is an inverted morality, a 'morality' of death. It teaches man that his interests are opposed to the interests of everyone else and that the only 'moral' thing he can do is to sacrifice his interests.
"But the 'morality' of altruism is exactly opposite to the facts of man's nature. In reality, the only thoughts and actions which are in man's self-interest are rational ones, and there is never any conflict of interest between men who are behaving rationally. Sacrifice harms not only the man who makes the sacrifice but also the man who accepts it; it is, therefore, inevitably detrimental. Acting in one's rational self-interest is always right, so the moral and the practical are simply two sides of the same coin. Evil--i.e., anti-life behavior--is, by its nature, weak and can only survive by the support good men can be misled into giving it. It follows, therefore, that a laissez-faire society is both practical and attainable. If a laissez-faire society is attainable, why haven't men established one before now? The answer is that essentially good people have prevented it by their unwitting support of slavery. The majority of people throughout history have accepted the idea that it was both proper and necessary for some men to coercively rule over others.
"It is this idea--that it is proper and/or necessary for some men to coercively govern others, which is the idea of government--that has prevented the establishment of a laissez-faire society and which has been responsible for incalculable human suffering and waste in the form of political and religious persecutions, taxes, regulations, conscription, slavery, wars, despotisms, etc. To achieve a laissez-faire society, it is only necessary to enable enough people to change this idea in their minds. All that is required for the defeat of evil is that good men stop their unwitting support of it.
"There is a great and growing conflict in our world between those who want to be free and those who want to rule (together with those who want to be ruled). The great conflict between freedom and slavery, though it has taken many forms, fInds its main expression in a conflict between two powerful and opposing human institutions--the free market and government. The establishment of a laissez-faire society depends on the outcome of the war between these two institutions--a war whose most crucial battles are fought on the fIeld of ideas."
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No Gods, No Governments, No Fathers, No Mothers—no SAVIORS, etc. will SAVE YOU. Once you understand this and accept your Personal Responsibility for your Freedom, then you will BE FREE and ask this of others, knowing this is the only Passage to Peace and Prosperity.