by Jacob G. Hornberger
The last words out of the mouth of strangling victim Eric Garner are actually a metaphor for how libertarians feel about the entire welfare-warfare state under which modern-day Americans have been born and raised.
Don’t his words express precisely how we libertarians feel? Leave us alone, we say to the state. Get out of our faces. Get out of our lives. You’re suffocating us. You’re killing us — literally, spiritually, financially, and economically.
Thomas Jefferson described this phenomenon in the Declaration of Independence: His government was sending “swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
There is hardly any part of our lives that government officials aren’t involved in. They just won’t leave us alone. Drug laws. Economic regulations. Income taxation. IRS audits. Asset forfeitures. Home raids. Secret surveillance. Draft registration. Permits and licenses. Minimum-wage laws. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Terrorist blowback. Checkpoints. Perpetual crises and chaos.
It never stops.
