A Fishing Story

A young conservative, Luke, and his friend, Bo, were fishing. The fish weren’t biting. As he was often inclined to do, Luke began to apply a little good-natured teasing to his friend, who leaned to the left. The conversation went something like this:

Luke: "So Bo, how’s your favorite president working out for you?"

Bo: "What do you mean?"

Luke: "Well, he’s risking bankrupting the country to implement a health care bill with an open-ended cost."

Bo: "Oh, you just don’t have any sympathy for those who can’t afford health insurance. We need to expand Medicaid to cover more people. Where’s your sense of charity?"

Luke: "Sure I am sympathetic, and give all I can to charity, but theft is not the way to solve the problem. Medicaid violates the Constitution."

Bo: "But if the bill is passed by Congress and the President approves it, it’s not theft, it’s lawful."

Luke: "Spoken like a true liberal - I’ll bet you a steak dinner that before we pull up anchor, you will agree with me that Medicaid already violates not only the Constitution, but man’s unalienable rights."

Bo: "It’s a bet. I’ll never agree with you on that. You’re heartless."

Luke: "So let’s just suppose you’re sailing across the South Pacific and your ship is wrecked by a storm. You and 15 others manage to survive and make it to a deserted island. A few months go by, and it becomes doubtful that you’ll ever be rescued."

Bo: "Kind of like CBS’s ‘Survivor’ reality show."

Luke: "Exactly, except that it is reality, not a contrived situation for entertainment – and no reward challenges." Over time, you all learn how to get along, and learn to cultivate food crops. Fresh water and all the resources you need to survive are native. In fairness, you divide up the island into 16 equally productive pieces of land, and with your improvised stick cultivators and other farming resources, you all become survivors and reasonably happy, at least as happy as you can be given the circumstances."

Bo: "OK, I’m with you so far. Are there single women on the island?"

Luke: "Stay focused! To carry you through dry spells, you learn to save and preserve a stash of food. One day, you go to your stash and discover that some is missing. Are you OK that someone had taken some of the food that you’ve produced?"

Bo: "Of course not! What an awful thing to do!! Where does he live?"

Luke: "Why are you upset? There is no government and no law which says that theft is illegal. And what if someone who was hungry needed it more than you?"

Bo: "I don’t need a law to tell me that stealing is wrong. If they had just asked and they were hungry, I’d have given them some food."

Luke: "Like charity, right?"

Bo: "Right"

Luke: "Do you believe in God?"

Bo: "You know I do, but what’s that got to do with it?"

Luke: "OK, let’s assume you don’t believe in God. By what authority do you think theft is wrong?"

Bo: "What do you mean ‘authority’? I don’t need an authority to tell me that I should be able to keep the food I work to produce."

Luke: "So it’s a natural right, just because you exist?"

Bo: "Yeah, I guess you could say that, but I can see where you’re going with this. Just because I have a right to keep that which I’ve earned doesn’t mean that I can’t choose to belong to a compassionate government which creates a pool of resources to share with the less fortunate."

Luke: "That’s a good point about government, but stay with me. Let’s continue to focus on natural rights for the moment, and I promise we’ll come back to government. So in addition to property rights, do you think you have other natural, inherent rights as a human being?"

Bo: "Well sure, I have a natural right to not be intentionally killed or harmed by others."

Luke: "I agree, that’s an important one, and you didn’t need someone or a higher power to tell you that you have that right as a human being. It’s the meaning of ‘unalienable’. Let’s take a tangent for a moment and assume that you were the only survivor to make it to the island alive. Do you think your natural rights extend to survival?"

Bo: "Well, sure I’d like to survive; who wouldn’t? But if you mean do I have a right to survival, I guess I’d have to say ‘no’. Protection from natural disasters or slothfulness is not something I could reasonably expect as a natural right."

Luke: "Right. So back on the island with your 15 neighbors, does the fact that you have neighbors alter in any way your natural rights?"

Bo: "No, why should it?"

Luke: "It shouldn’t; I agree with you. So you are living on this island with 15 others and you each have property rights, a right to not be intentionally harmed, but no natural right to survival. And these rights or lack thereof extend to you all equally, right?"

Bo: "Right."

Luke: "Now let’s go back to your unfortunate sudden decline in food supply. There is no government on the island, because there hasn’t until now been a need for one. There is no course of appeal for the injustice, and again assuming that you don’t believe in God, no one to pray to for coals of fire to rain down on your thieving neighbor. What do you do?"

Bo: "Well it’s time for some ‘prairie justice’."

Luke: ‘Yeah, but that could be messy. What if the perpetrator is a foot taller than you and much stronger? One solution would be to gain the agreement of the other 15 inhabitants and form a government. And you collectively decide that the only reason for the government’s existence is to protect the natural rights of each citizen. You thereby write a brief Island Constitution, and elect a judge and two policemen. Two are necessary to handle your rather large, bully neighbor."

Bo: "I can definitely see the need for an island government – so far, so good."

Luke: "Now, here’s a very important point: when you formed the government, what you did was individually delegate to the government your power to enforce your natural rights, nothing more, nothing less."

Bo: "OK, I see; the government’s power comes from the people, and since government is not a living being, it has of itself no natural rights or powers."

Luke: "Good!! We’re making progress, and I’m much closer to that steak dinner."

Bo: "Not so fast! Now that there’s a government, I’m going to propose a new law at our next island meeting to start a Crop Failure Food Pantry from which to feed those whose crops fail through no fault of their own."

Luke: "And so I suppose that you’ve agreed that your government is a democracy, and laws may be passed with a 51% majority, right?"

Bo: "Right, it’s certainly not a communist government if I have anything to do with it."

Luke: "Good. And how do you propose to stock the Crop Failure Food Pantry?"

Bo: "Like any good democratic form of government, we’ll levy a small tax on each citizen. This will be fair, because it will benefit any of the 16 citizens who experience crop failure. And we’ll plan ahead far enough to have enough food for the entire island in case everyone has crop failures at the same time."

Luke: "Wow, that’s pretty ambitious, again spoken like a true liberal."

Bo: "Thank you!"

Luke: "Continuing our hypothetical scenario, let’s say that when you take the vote, 9 vote yea and 7 vote nay. By what authority are you going to collect the food levies from the 7 who voted against the bill?"

Bo: "That’s easy, it’s the government and the law was passed democratically."

Luke: "I can taste that porterhouse already! Let’s say you’re one of the 7 nay votes – you didn’t agree with the law. And you’ve already agreed that I as an individual don’t have a right to steal from you, right?"

Bo: "Right, but you aren’t the one doing the stealing, uh I mean the taxing, it’s the government."

Luke: "But you also agreed that I can’t delegate to Island Government a power that I don’t have, and since I don’t have the right to take what’s yours, I can’t ask my government to do that for me. Case closed."

Bo: "Uh, uh, uh, well…"

Luke: "Medicaid, food stamps, the proposed national health care plan and many, many other government programs, while they have noble intentions, are unconstitutional and worse yet violate mankind’s natural rights."

Bo: "Wow, I’ve never thought about it that way, but how can you be right when we’re a free country?"

Luke: "Even though we like to sing about ‘the land of the free’, we haven’t been truly free for a very long time. You are now among maybe 3% of American’s who really understand that we have voted away our most cherished and fundamental, God-given freedoms under the guise of compassion and social equality."

Bo: "Now I understand what Lincoln meant by ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. But what if we’d all signed a contract to form the Crop Failure Food Pantry – that would be OK, right?"

Luke: "Yes, but only for collecting taxes from those who had agreed to the terms of the contract. If that single girl you asked about earlier made the very poor decision to marry you and you conceived a child, your child could not be taxed for the Food Pantry without violating his or her natural rights."

Bo: "Hey! I’d be a very good catch!!"

Luke: "You earlier used the phrase ‘…choose to belong to a benevolent government…’, but most citizens don’t choose to belong to their governments, they are born into them."

Bo: "I can taste the steak too."

Luke: "OK, in true liberal fashion, when you’re proven wrong, you change the subject."

Bo: "Not true - I’m hungry. How about a chopped sirloin and you get the tip?"

Luke: "Again like a liberal, when it’s your money, you are cheaping out on me; all right, chopped sirloin it is. Raise the anchor."

As American citizens, we all have a duty to help protect what freedom we have left. And part of that responsibility involves educating our family, friends and acquaintances on liberty, as Luke did. It is also our responsibility to vote, and remove from office those who won’t protect our remaining liberties or work to restore those we’ve lost. Sadly, most elected Democrats and Republicans don’t understand the simple concepts Luke explained, or if they do are too dishonest to vote accordingly. My earnest prayer is that the readers of this fishing story will go away with a better understanding of true liberty and help spread the word.