Representative Paul Ryan, in his first speech as Mitt Romney’s running mate, declared that the source of our rights is not government but God and nature. We each may have our own conception of God. However, Ryan overlooks the fact that nature has many faces.
One face of nature spawns hurricanes and bacteria. We need the government’s National Weather Service to warn us to take shelter from hurricanes. We need government-sponsored medical research such as that at the National Institutes of Health to enable us to survive bacteria.
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If his comment that our rights come from God, and not government, imply that no government is never needed, what does that say about James Madison, and the other framers of our nation. Extremists, all of them. They believed in man's God given freedom too.
We need A weather service and we need medical research. But it does not follow that those must be provided by the government. Medical research is already done privately. And although the gov't operates the weather satellites, there's no economic or technological reason that they could not be privatized.
Indeed! There is great irony in the fact that many, many nations, countless nations on this planet spent hundreds of years developing civilized societies from places where dire poverty of the vast majority of the population, what amounted to indentured servitude, chaos, senseless violence, summary executions of innocents, etc., reigned supreme. These nations did this by abolishing autocratic rules and establishing democratic... governments. These governments indeed helped create the relatively peaceful and wealthy states we are fortunate to reside in today... In this country, for the past few decades it seems an increasing number of people believe that it would be best to return to the wild and ruthless days of yore... Well, they should rejoice because... we're getting there...