A Right or a Privilege?
“The person who states this always assumes themselves on the advantage side of this equation.”
Since the first time I heard this argument used for something in the United States, I knew it was wrong. Its premise is wrong and its basis is anti-American, anti-Constitutional and against everything the United States has as its basis.
Privilege is a concept of social order, caste systems and aristocracy. It is occasionally social elitism and academic or intellectual elitist by use historically. It is also found in numerous writings of socialism and Marxist doctrines. It is the antithesis of America’s premise.
Rights as defined in this argument, “is it a right or a privilege” is also Marxist, Taoist, Communist and socialism in its truest sense. Its concept of “right” of the people is corrupted by the tyranny of those who would judge it, offer it, control it, manage it and insure it done.
In a land of freedom and individual rights as the US is founded – it is both right and privilege, yet neither one is the basis by which we guide our choices, policies, laws, decisions and tenets.
Our founding principles are those of freedom, equality of rights and opportunities, guaranteed individual rights, capitalism, democracy and government by consent rather than by tyranny and rule.
The assurance of collective rights of the people managed and insured by a small corps of government who are all powerful does not assure the rights of the individual nor the equality of opportunities to all. Nor does it promote liberty, equality of rights and opportunities nor government by the people, of the people and for the people which represents the people of the United States of America.
Whether that is made because of aristocracy and elitism or through socialism and communism, both are wrong – yielding no more than abuses of power, corruption, oppression, poverty, restrictive prosperity for only a few, and eventually, deteriorating societies over any appreciable time.
For instance, the freedom to drive a vehicle in our modern world should be understood as neither right nor privilege but as necessity. Education, as well, is neither right nor one of privilege but of necessity, and to a greater advantage and benefit of us all and of our nation. Home ownership is not naturally a basis of status but rather of a place to live and a safe harbor from which individuals and families can operate and conduct their lives, participate in their communities and assure their own well-being. When the prices of housing and properties, of basic necessities for living are not in the same table of reference with wages and ways of earning a sustainable living, a destruction of the society will occur by the nature of its injustice and failure.
Opportunities to conduct business and opportunities for employment are necessities of all and are guaranteed by our Constitution and founding principles to be available equally to any that will work for them. Where is the place in America to exclude those not of privileged classes in our tenets? These are not collective rights nor only assured to those privileged enough to access them. These are individual rights to opportunity equally shared by all American citizens regardless of status, religion, race, nationality, gender, age, or “wholeness” by some prescribed measure.
Whenever I hear the use of this argument by anyone, “is it a right or a privilege,” I am outraged. It is the very tenet of socialism and communist doctrine that came from academic elitists which began in aristocracy and oppression that we have fought across the world to end. It undermines the very foundations of America.
We have come to a point in the world and in the United States where those with privilege by access to opportunity and wealth have used their financial gain to insure their greater voice in matters affecting us all. And, where our individual rights have been compromised by a few in the name of our “collective rights” with both aristocracy and socialists using the same argument for their abuses of power and position. Both are wrong and have contributed to decimating the foundations of our society in their struggles for power and by their abuses of it.
The aristocratic class has insured our demise by financially excluding most Americans from the process of education, of government, of politics, of the acquisition of homes and reasonable employment, and of business, business ownership, entrepreneurial enterprise and prosperity. The aristocracy in America have denied access to freedom, rights and opportunities of the greatest number of Americans living under the oppression of despicable power-mongering, money-greedy twisted world views than any dictatorship in history. They have decimated the living standard, level of education and prosperity of every individual American and of our nation.
The socialists and liberals through collectivism have insured our demise through shoddy workmanship in American products and services, business deprecation, depravity, greed for power, reduced incentives, increase of abject poverty, exclusion of certain rights, such as driving, education, individual freedoms and economic inclusion to many, through segregation of economic disadvantaged, and by forcing unethical choices on political officials and those in authority. They have single-handedly destroyed the opportunities for all but a very few which sit comfortable in their assured freedoms of elitist intellectualism and positions of power within the government of the United States of America. They deny every foundation that applies to the true freedoms and guarantee of individual rights honored by our Constitution.
Both aristocrats and socialists suffer in many ways from the abuse of power syndrome which is indicated by the adage, “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and both have decimated our country’s opportunity to survive and to compete in a larger world today and in the future. There is no good life, good living or great America in their choices for us all to endure.
The important questions are these:
1. What gives us competitive advantage now and in the future as individuals and as a nation?
2. What things open greater opportunity and advantage to every American?
3. What needs to be done to make wealth, education, opportunity and quality of life equally and easily available to all, for every individual that chooses to pursue it?
4. What continues to foster, protect, nourish and enhance our freedoms and individual rights and liberties along with our prosperity as a nation and as individuals?
5. What insures our sustenance and growth as a nation while protecting the tenets of our founding principles and foundation ideologies?
Without the premise of those ideologies, we are not America nor a land of the free, home of the brave. Nor are we fighting across the world in support of a greater cause. Without aristocracy and without socialists, our economy and our society will thrive. But it will not thrive without freedom, equality, democracy, capitalism, free market economy, representative government, and equal opportunities to education, prosperity and liberty.
By unnaturally manipulating our economy, prices of housing and property, opportunities to employment and enterprise, opportunities to higher education by price and financing, access to quality and quantity of food and other necessary goods, and by excluding individuals from their Constitutionally guaranteed rights for any number of reasons, the United States has lost its place and lost its ways that insured its continued existence and power. It is now a third world economy and a second world power with no real innovation nor threshold of invention compared to the world market stage.
Our country has devolved into a place of police brutality, pervasive intolerance, unjustified cruelty, rampant crime and denial of basic human rights on a regular basis while the greatest criminals of all time sit in our government and in the protected aristocracy of business leadership. Our government on every level is ineffective at best, expensive on average and abusive all too commonly.
At ground level, individual Americans are denied the rights to feel angry, annoyed or agitated by events and situations in their lives, nor are they allowed to feel sad, grieved, outraged, embarrassed, humiliated nor indignant about things happening in their lives and in our country. Our government locally is given the rights to come into their homes without cause to take them into locked confinement without rights, take their children and in many cases, to take their property and destroy their belongings for any reason whatsoever, including eminent domain and the government’s desire to use the property for something else.
The United States of America resembles nothing of the freedoms and assurances of rights given to individuals by the Constitution with over twenty percent of our population at any given time incarcerated in prisons and well over ten percent living in locked institutions of “mental health” and behavior modification camps and programs in the name of “mental health,” in the use of this for the business health of pharmaceutical companies and as the destruction of dissident populations. According to European standards, over twenty-five percent of our nation lives in poverty with limited access to the abundance they see around them and because of the caste system existing in our nation today, they will never have access to wealth and abundance in their lifetimes no matter what they do.
The most trite and trivial application of the incredible number of petty and unreasonable laws are applied to most of the population across the United States on a day-to-day basis while those in positions of authority, power, politics, financial power and influence adhere to no laws whatsoever nor are held accountable to them in any way. We live in a police state at the hands of both Democrats and Republicans and their abuses of power.
When the Chinese authorities during the Olympics stopped a journalist from reporting an undesirable story, it was obvious that we were seeing China operate and not America, when the police didn’t beat the living daylights out of the reporter before tazing him handcuffed on the ground and hauling him away to be locked away for several years as they do every day across America.
When the woman in a New York mental hospital intake died waiting to be locked away and put on psychiatric drugs involuntarily this year, it wasn’t an isolated incident and neither was her being placed there an appropriate help to her situation. She had worked for quite awhile before losing her job and then losing her place to live. When she asked to be helped by the minister that she had worked alongside, that knew her – the law was called because she was “agitated” having found herself homeless after working hard and doing the right things. That is communism in America at work and is so common that people find it acceptable.
There are homeless and those living in abject poverty that will always be excluded from “the game” that America has become at the hands of the powerful and financially status-oriented. Their opportunities are not only denied but basic human rights available to all living beings are also denied. That is not a mental health condition but rather one of extreme oppression, aristocracy and exclusion from participation. This is America as it has been re-created in the image and view of America’s leadership, both by the intellectual elite and political dictatorship at the helm in the United States today. That is the twisted view of the world that needs correcting with some serious mental health applications in the realm of our leadership.
We have an entire country filled with houses that no one can afford to own where years and years of equity and efforts were wiped out within a few short weeks to suit the greed of Wall Street and our politicians in the name of their business friends. The money that was created for them was assured at the expense of every homeowner and American citizen, at the hands of every employee that will ever work in America and over the needs of any human being living in the United States today and in the future.
Our President demands that we “unleash the keys of America’s entrepreneurial spirit,” while socialism and communism are the tenets he and his Washington friends use to bind us all into oppression and insolvency. His Congressional friends and business buddies must need some new ideas and innovations to steal since they’ve found themselves at a disadvantage in the world using their own ideas. These “leaders” have managed to exclude everyone else that might think differently about things than they do such that they would have new ideas and innovations and when they have these ideas available, they dishonor them by stealing from their inventors.
This is a nation of abhorrence and continued wealth assured to only a few while the rest live in destitution and lack of opportunities in any measure. And, where the lowest disadvantaged third of our country is subjected to every horror of socialism, communism, oppression and abuse of power, our leadership fails to do even one small thing for themselves by their own hands. Their food is cooked for them, their cars driven for them, their accounting administered for them, their yards landscaped and kept up for them, their hair cut for them, their houses cleaned for them, and their asses wiped for them, because it is beneath them to do it.
Personally, I would not have wanted to put my name on that $700 billion dollar Wall Street banking and business bailout bill while ignoring the will of the American people by doing it, especially knowing that somewhere in America, I would have to sleep at night, my food would be cooked by someone besides me, and that I would want to eat at a restaurant or go on vacation somewhere in the world where others would be serving me. Not in this lifetime or the next, would I rest easy after ignoring the will of the people that I was hired to represent and after genuinely screwing them.
There is nowhere in America to hide from these facts at a point. It will not be long before those impoverished by politics and exclusion will find the rich where they sleep. It is easily found throughout history, even in the history of our own country when English rule threatened the survival of a foundling nation and its interests. There is no protection from the reality our current corrupt leaders of government and business have created for all of us and its results.
There are no sales when a company has abused the privilege of its position and power in the marketplace because it depends upon the great “unwashed masses” for its existence and continued profitability. There are no positions of power in the United States when finally tolerance for their abuse stops and apathy gives way to action. We are the governed by consent of the governed and sooner or later – there is no where to hide from that real fact.
Consequently – here is the answer to the question, “is it a right or is it a privilege.” It is both my privilege and my right as an American citizen and as a human being to stand equal to any and all that would choose to judge by that question. It is my right and my privilege by virtue of waking up alive today, to be of equal value to our nation and our national interests as are any others alive this day. And, it is my right and my privilege to be more valuable than any other category of objects, whether money, property, prestige or thing, greed, power, or status.
Corporate America does not exist nor thrive without us. Intellectual elitists, socialists and communists in the name of assured collective rights cannot sleep well without our apathy. And, the aristocracy and dictatorship of the US government does not survive separate from and exclusive to our consent of power. Republicans and Democrats have abused the power and authority given to them and done so at our expense. None of them are worthy of the breath God gave them nor fit to lead anything nor anybody at any time for any reason. They’ve proven it.
And, despite brutality by police, abuse by government systems intended to “help” which did no more than destroy every basic human right, civil right and freedom that I was guaranteed by America and her Constitution, and despite authorities, socialists and aristocrats of America excluding my participation in the wealth and prosperity of capitalism – it is my right and my privilege to push that boot off my back and off the backs of every American citizen living today to restore America to her founding tenets of freedom and protections of our inalienable rights.
Written by Cricket Diane C “Sparky” Phillips, 10-09-08, USA
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Henry M. Paulson, Jr.
