The more money you receive from others, the less liberty you have. When you are dependent on someone else for your livelihood, you open yourself up to the possibility of bondage. It becomes easy to let someone else control your income, your standard of living, and your lifestyle. But that is not what it means to live in liberty!
Liberty is the opportunity to make a choice to assume responsibility, and accept the consequences. If you are beholden to your employer, your family, or to the government for money, you cannot experience true liberty because your opportunities and choices become drastically smaller.
There are four ways of earning money in today's society.
1. You are an employee, and trade your time for money
2. You are self-employed, and use your skill to earn money
3. You are an owner, and have people working to make you money
4. You are an investor, and your money makes you more money
Most people are in the first category, and work for a small business, a company, or a corporation, trading their time for a wage. This is the typical 9 to 5 job; the rat race that everyone tries to escape. Nobody likes to be told what to do all the time, or to be a nameless laborer. Everybody has the desire to express themselves, use their strengths and talents, and be treated with dignity and respect. The person who truly enjoys being an employee is rare.
Most people would rather be in the third or fourth category, because it provides what everyone craves - freedom, independence, liberty! Yet much fewer people are in this category. Many believe the myth that to be in the third or fourth categories takes 30 years of working up the corporate ladder, or inheriting a great deal of money.
The truth is that anyone can be an owner. Everybody has an idea, a talent, a skill that can make money. Anyone, if they work hard enough, can start their own home-based business, and develop a second stream of income. Those who really want it to work will make it work, and will discover a new level of personal liberty. It is exciting to take control of your life, and not live under the power of someone with more money than you.
That is why welfare and entitlement programs are so damaging to those they purport to help. Really, these programs just put the participant under a new form of bondage; one that is very difficult to escape from. Furthermore, they are based on a faulty premise that says government owes people a living.
A government does not exist to control people, but rather to protect their rights. When it doles out money to different sectors of society, it increases its role beyond what it was created to do, asserts more control over the lives of its people, and threatens their liberty.
The preservation and sustainment of Liberty depends on you. It's time to discover liberty or lose it.
