&

After reading Albert Stichka’s opposing view of government in our joint article in the July issue of The Fayetteville FEED, I decided that a response was in order to some of his key points and assumptions that I believe attempt to distort and marginalize the views of small-government advocates and the libertarian position.

I have a lot of respect for Albert, both as a professional and intellectual, and think that his positions on government stem from an honest belief that the role of government in modern society to is to help people, particularly the less fortunate. However, it was Supreme Court Justice William Brandeis who said that “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent…The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” I believe that truer words have probably never been spoken. Large government advocates like Albert, who are well-intentioned but naïve to the nature of economic law and to the secondary and tertiary consequences of their actions, are most likely to harm the economic and civil liberties of everyone in the name of helping a select few. They don’t understand that their policies often harm those they wish to help.

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She well knows that by enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom. -- John Quincy Adams