Looking In the Mirror

This article was featured in our weekly newsletter, the Liberator Online. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here. Nearly every government official or candidate for office has a governmental solution for issues we face, regardless of the nature of that issue. Poverty? Let’s adjust the minimum wage. Education? Let’s tweak this or implement that new and shiny idea in government schools. Jobs? We need the government efforts to lure businesses to a certain area with special favors. What these “solutions” fail to address is the largest problem, the government itself. They seek to reform a reform of a reform that needed to change. We’re told that these solutions are “outside the box” thinking, yet they simply make a small adjustment thought to “fix” the problem they’ve now uncovered. Let’s think “outside the box” for just minute here… What if we looked in the mirror for a moment and asked, “How can I solve this? Who would I ask for advice about [X]?” without the baggage of what currently exists and the bias toward the status quo? Obviously, our varied expertise and experience, as well as our areas of passion will drive our focus to the areas of greatest interest. Would you want a brickmason determining healthcare policy? What does a realtor know about which math curriculum works best for students on the autism spectrum? How can a single person be enough of an expert in all that government involves themselves in to accurately determine the best outcomes in each and every case? What we see occur is that an agenda drives the decision-making to a “one size fits all” solution for over 300 million Americans. What if we decided not to outsource all of this to a few people with a vested interest in keeping things as they are. After all, if they solved the problems we face, why would we need them? Further, if they had the solutions, wouldn’t they have already fixed everything? What does this have to with liberty? If we took it upon ourselves to examine these issues and used our tendency to consider outcomes rather than intent and to seek out experts for their perspective, we can offer some pretty solid solutions that lean toward liberty and away from Big Government’s further growth. Real solutions begin with us.