I’ve added a pro-American Iraqi’s blog to my list. I have an American unfriendly one there too. It’s possible I could end up in Iraq before this is over, and I’d rather hear it first hand than through the news media.
Ali, the blog’s author, lists Irish as his favorite type of music. Weird as that is, he is a cogent writer with an excellent command of English and positive opinions about the future of Iraq.
Of course, reading about Iraqi opinion polls both bothers and reassures me. I hate opinion polls, I hate pundits and I hate the attention whoring that goes on in the press. However, they are all indicators of a fair amount of freedom in a society. As much as I bitch about the state of the nation here in the U.S. the average American is still relatively free to opine in public forums.
However, there are a lot of things we’re increasingly less free to do.
Here’s a little list of things we should be working on in both countries:
No police checkpoints/military checkpoints inside the national borders – a free society does not restrict the movements of the population from point A to point B by using force.
No restrictions on weapons ownership – a free society holds the citizen up as the most basic unit on which everything else depends. If you cannot trust your own citizens with unrestricted weapons, your society is not truly free.
Reduction of tax burden – I have no idea what sort of taxes are being paid by Iraqi workers, but I know that the average worker in the United States is an economic slave. By most estimates I read a middle class American pays a total of 40-47% of their lifetime labor into the public coffers. The way I look at it, a free society does not steal the sweat off your back by force. The very fact that the IRS needs 120,000 employees to collect a “voluntary tax” and that they routinely use intimidation and massive force to collect indicates that there is a huge problem. Let’s work on the whole modern slavery issue.
Less centralized government – The federal government is a bloated behemoth that has grown into the mammoth beast the founders of this nation feared most. It tries to govern everything and anything, and ends up making most things it touches worse for the wear. I hope that the Iraqis do not repeat this mistake. Central government should provide for a strong military and that’s about it. A behemoth central government always results in less freedom due to the very nature of the bureaucrats that run that government.
I wonder what Ali from Free Iraqi would think if he knew that many Americans are worried about the decreasing amount of freedom in America? We’re over there claiming to be freeing a country when most of us have no idea what real freedom is.