Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   7/07/2015

       To be free or not to be free

Larger issues of the origins and “first principles” of American freedom can be easily overlooked amidst the gatherings, picnics, celebrations and fireworks of our Independence Day weekend. Thoughtful purveyors of conservative opinion were illuminating and elevating; items from past Daily News issues inspired thoughts on “real world” aspects of our freedoms.

For instance, we enjoy freedom of movement around our towns, cities, and within and among our many states. Aside from military and security facilities and agricultural inspection stops, we are free of border checkpoints and demands for our travel papers.

However, if you think about it, we often exercise self-imposed limits on where we go due to concerns for safety based on real or perceived crime risks. A large part of that self-restriction is based on the failure to restrict the freedom of criminals, gangsters and drug offenders who’ve been judged, convicted and legally incarcerated. California legislatures and voters have foolishly weakened that system without considering the threats to their and their fellow citizens’ freedom to safely move about our cities and state.

So, when immigrants, legal and illegal, become empowered to flout the law by either crossing our border, overstaying their visa or green cards, or committing crimes that should rightfully result in their incarceration and/or removal, their freedom becomes a threat to our freedom. Likewise, when a city like San Francisco flouts federal immigration law and proclaims itself a “sanctuary city,” its fair and law-abiding residents can become victims for the violent, lawless, psychotic criminal element.

The headline in the October 18 Daily News, “Thousands released after immigration holds denied,” described the confluence of soft, unenforced immigration laws and the refusal of jurisdictions to protect the safety and, yes, freedom for citizens and legal immigrants to be secure in their homes and public places. The death toll at the hands of criminal illegal aliens has risen into hundreds and thousands over time—murders that should never have happened had our border been secured with double fencing for its length; had our law enforcement at local, state and federal levels worked cooperatively to find, deport or keep in prison those who’ve broken the law by coming here and becoming predators; and had judges not violated the trust we, the people, place in them to see that we are protected from such depraved law-breakers.  

 

Hence, Francisco Sanchez, a five-time deportee of Mexican origin, a serial violator of our laws, found his way once again to the “sanctuary city” of San Francisco, found drugs and a handgun and randomly murdered a young woman who was only exercising her and her father’s freedom to move about their city. These types of heart-wrenching stories of murder, rape, child rape, injury, theft and destruction are a criminal and immigration plague on our seemingly free nation. When the laws are set aside for reasons of convenience or political correctness (i.e. not wanting to offend the immigrant communities) or because of an artificially manufactured lack of jail space—those violations of our government’s basic obligations render our freedoms thin and tenuous at best.

Young Americans are induced to take on debt through an abundance of accessible education loan money; they are not encouraged to give forethought to the likelihood of using their expensive degrees to secure income sufficient to timely repay said loans. How economically or personally free are they when such loans impede their future employment options? Such basic freedom of livelihood becomes an illusion, does it not?

The liberal solution appears to be “loan forgiveness” or other methods of relieving former students of their first major financial obligation in life. What lessons, in the responsibility that needs to accompany any freedom, are taught to someone who has signed for a loan, partied away their years earning degrees irrelevant to high-paying jobs and then looks to everyone else, via government, to bail them out? I’m just sayin’… (See: “The Hidden Student-Debt Bomb—Under the radar, maneuvers to avoid paying off loans are surging. ‘Forbearance’ has hit the $125 billion mark.” The Wall Street Journal, 12/30/2014)

I challenge anyone to assert that being provided with someone else’s money—whether via a loan, a mortgage, a gift, a trust fund or an income-qualified government benefit—does not diminish one’s freedom by degrees. And yet, the lessons of human nature—which never accepts “other people’s money” with the same pride and freedom of choice as money earned through one’s own efforts—have been lost over decades of time and dozens of benefit programs.

So, it struck me that those lessons are also lost on Sacramento Democrats after reading, “Tackling poverty a Dem priority,” June 6 Daily News (AP). Each and every idea for “tackling poverty” will inevitably reduce incentives for the poor to freely provide for themselves, as well as inexorably diminish the freedom, ability and desire of businesses to locate, grow and hire: “raising the minimum wage, expanding health care to immigrants, (unionizing) child care providers…subsidies for child care, tax credits to low income earners, expand welfare benefits and build affordable housing.” The only problematic rub? Not enough money!

On April 17, I read, “New Kansas rules would limit spending of welfare benefits by recipients,” showing in plain terms that when other people are footing the welfare benefits/entitlement bill, they get to limit recipients’ spending freedom.