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As an admirer of our great country's forefathers, including Thomas Jefferson and leaders like Abraham Lincoln (who's birthday we celebrated this month), I'm in complete agreement with their belief that we are supposed to be a nation of individual rights and freedoms.
We are entitled to these as human beings regardless of race, age, gender or where you choose to live.
Individual rights and freedoms are elegant, timeless, transcendent and apply to all. They are the basis for what we call natural or God given, and were considered common ethics of educated people during the early years of our country's history.
Such rights are what inspired Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and moved George Washington to survive the difficult winter of 1777.
When it comes to politics, including those of us who serve in Juneau, we need to remember that individual rights and freedoms are what our country was founded on and not stray from that. The individual should be placed ahead of government, and the state needs to acknowledge that it exists to do the will of the people, not the other way around. That means a limited government that stays restricted in terms of public safety, schools, justice and roads-not a myriad of programs run by a big, wasteful bureaucracy.
Sheer majority rule is a very dangerous thing, because if we allow it to rule in every circumstance, then as John Stuart Mill warned, the tyranny of the majority results in people being forced into socialistic servitude, as the masses in Europe and in Middle East countries learned.
Our nation should remain a beacon of freedom to the world. And Alaska can pull itself out of its slide toward bigger and bigger government. Look at what happened recently in Fairbanks with the call for more spending and tking away more of your money to pay for it.
Freedom works. Freedom brings prosperity and invention. It also brings voluntary charity, something that can go a long way to cutting back on all the taxpayer welfare our society seems to accept. Freedom brings all the good things the world now enjoys. It's why our nation leaped from covered wagons to high tech jet liners in less than a century.
We need to keep in mind what individual rights and freedoms represent as we go about our work in Juneau. We need to remember that, as special interest groups come to us with their hand out, asking for advantages over others through the force of law, including social programs and the taxes to pay for them.
This is precisely why I have always voted against new taxes of any kind. Unfortunately, we as a state surpassed the notion of a limited government years ago, and it's something I'm constantly fighting to bring back. I believe we have gone back from the virtues of 1776, although we could bring it back if we have the courage and wisdom to cut the bureaucracy, reject new taxes and reduce laws, rules and restrictions on people to unleash the magic of true free enterprise. This will continue to be my goal as we move forward into the 21st century.
More specifically, we need to cut back the bureaucracy to a more manageable level and eliminate unconstitutional programs. We should even re-write the Constitution to allow for private property owners to have subsurface rights to their land when it comes to developing natural resources like oil and gas.
If we do these things, people as individuals in Alaska will become extremely productive and we will lead the rest of the nation into an era of new prosperity. We in Juneau should lead the way by demonstrating that freedom needs to be the primary goal of all politics.
This is Representative Vic Kohring, serving Wasilla and the Mat-Su Valley.
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