If You’re Worried About People Having Too Much Power Over You, Then I’ve Got Great News

I’m not going to pretend that the right doesn’t engage in it from time to time too, but the hysterics that arise from the left when something doesn’t go their way is akin to the temper tantrums I’ve seen thrown by children.

The retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy provided us with some grade-A hyperbole and the finest in keyboard panic. To see it, one need only go on Twitter and watch at the rending of clothing, wailing, and gnashing of teeth develop with each new article on Trump’s potential replacement.

Such is the asininity of the claims of doom and destruction that I had to make fun of it in an article, which you can read here, but this same unbridled catastrophism wanted me to highlight a far more serious solution.

Every time someone we didn’t vote for gets into office, it’s the worst day in America, and it only opens the door for the kind of apocalyptic mayhem that paves the road for people dying in the streets from lack of this, or people being herded into American concentration camps from an over-abundance of that.

Behind the hysterics is the sudden realization that the person engaging in the panic has, and that’s that the people in power have too much power.

But instead of hearkening back to the time they stood up and demanded their politician be given the ability to do accomplish task X by giving them extra power to do so, they add rage to their hopes that one day their resistance to the current politician yields a politician they like better.

And he or she might come, but then soon the process repeats.

As a libertarian minded guy, I often find myself throwing my hands up in the air as the solution is right in front of everyone, and yet no one wants to see it. The panic is unnecessary, not just because no one is marching anyone into death camps, but because we don’t need to be this scared of our government. We as a Americans have the unique ability to limit the scope of our government. We can vote in citizens who will go about the task of reducing their own position until it’s as effective as a clerical position.

We don’t, though. We put people we like in power, and because we like them, and allow them to gift themselves more power. Such is their power that they can put people in power that we had no vote over. America is filthy with unelected officials, but these positions also become so important that we fight like mad to put the right person in charge to make sure these positions are squared away to our liking.

For too many Americans, that use of power is okay so long as we like the person in office, but the problem is that the person we like won’t be in office forever. Either due to term limits, retirement, or death, a human cannot maintain his office indefinitely. Trump will not be president forever. He may be voted out in 2020, or finish his term in 2024. Either way, he’s not going to be in power, and after him may come a hard leftist that will bring this country’s economy to a grinding halt, or implement social justice policies that creates a social regression.

If that does happen, the panic will begin anew and we’ll wonder why government is so overbearing. The artists will draw more pictures of the fat pig that is government standing next to the starving citizen, and God knows what policies they may try and succeed to pass.

Yet we learn nothing. We continue to — instead of reducing the size, scope, and power of government — just try to put someone in power that we like so that all that — what we previously called — overbearing power is used to overbear in the direction a chunk of us like.

We have forgotten the power we hold as American citizens because we’ve given so much of it up to people we distrust, and inevitably come to dislike. We get so wrapped up in making sure that the other side has a hell of a time that we forget that by doing so we’re giving that same side the power to screw us down the line.

The real power belongs to the people, not in the people coming together to elect a government, but the individual who can forge his own destiny.

My simple advice? Vote in people who don’t want to rule over you. Vote in people who will proceed to eliminate or significantly reduce parts of the government you were previously panicking over because someone you didn’t like was in charge. Not doing so will only make things worse, and maybe eventually you really will have something to panic about.

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