Ballot Access
Help Ed and the Libertarians get Permanent Ballot Access in Illinois.About Ed
Who is Ed Rutledge and why should you vote for him?What is a Libertarian?
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Take the world's smallest political quiz and see where you fit!What about the Community?
By Ed Rutledge
Libertarians have an undeserved reputation for neglecting the idea of Community. In realty, the Libertarian Party is the only party that consistently promotes the concept of Community in practical terms.
What is your Community? Was it created by the state? Is it a bureaucratic program? Or is your Community made up of your neighbors, your friends, your family, and everyone else with whom you interact?
Community cannot be created from the top down, by mandate or by legislation. Community is a group of people, of individual human beings. If we are going to have a strong sense of Community, we need to respect the dignity of each individual member of our Community.
And if we want to have a healthy Community, then we must accept that there are fundamental Responsibilities that we must bear as members of our Community. These Responsibilities distinguish liberty from license, and form the foundation which supports all of our individual rights.
We have an obligation to live peacefully. We have an obligation to live responsibly. And we have an obligation to help those members of our Community who are less fortunate than ourselves. Not through a bureaucracy, or a government program. These are our personal Responsibilities, for each of us to assume voluntarily and to the best of our ability.
Throughout the past several decades, this concept of Community as a collection of individuals has been steadily eroded by our bureaucratic politicians who have sold us on the idea that we can outsource our Responsibilities to government. They have conned us into thinking that we can and should rely on their bureaucratic programs to take care of “The People.”
So just as our politicians have been quietly replacing our rights with privileges, and our society with politics, they are replacing our Community with bureaucracy. This is a very dangerous trend. A bureaucracy simply does not have the capacity to care about individual people. But real Community, which is made up of individual people, does.
When we are tricked into handing our Responsibilities over to government, our sense of Community becomes endangered. It is time for us to reclaim our Responsibilities from the bureaucrats in Springfield and Washington, so that we can restore our sense of Community and the human dignity that goes with it.
