Ben Stein mentions something I’ve considered writing about for a while. He talks about lives having meaning, and the main reason I am a libertarian is because the state, through its hired managers, seeks to impose meaning on the world and tell individual human beings what their lives mean. The state or the collective (such as the community or the “nation”) seeks to impose value by telling you what you can live for (or what you must live for), what you can (or must) die for, and when. I have concluded that no one — not George W. Bush, not Usama bin Laden, nobody — has that right save me and God.
I, and I alone, get to say what my life means, what it is worth, what I will live for, and most importantly, what I will die for.
4:30 pm on January 30, 2006
