“Of all sad things in the world, the saddest is to see a people who have once known liberty and freedom and then lost it.” — E.T. Benson
The choice between freedom and slavery should be easy. Unfortunately, the infinitely complex universe refuses to make such choices automatic, mindless, and obvious to even the unthinking.
Preserving liberty requires constant vigilance as enslavers masquerade as “beacons of liberty.”
I learned this the hard way. There was a time when a gullible me assumed that, if someone claimed to be “for freedom,” they were my ally. I signed onto and contributed to virtually every cause with the words “freedom” and “liberty” in the sales pitch.
That is how I became an early “VIP donor” to the Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF). Originally it was a “think tank” comprised of known colleagues, solid advocates for limited government, lower taxes, and more personal responsibility.
But the organization changed. It demanded openness and transparency since hidden agendas obstruct free choice. But then it restructured itself to hide its donors from the public.
In 2020, the organization took a stance that appalled me. It mounted an all-out crusade against House Bill 515, the Idaho Patient Act, assigning the bill a massive -9 on its “Freedom Index.”
For comparison legislation that year committing Idaho to Medicaid expansion scored a -2, and massive new regulations on all childcare providers scored -3.
So, what pure Marxism did HB 515 impose? Its statement of purpose read “restoring basic free market principles of transparency and access to information.” Put simply, it asks Idaho courts to treat medical debt collection more like any other debt collector. That seems fair.
But I also knew something undisclosed by the IFF. The Vice-Chair of their board was one of Idaho’s most famous and aggressive medical debt collectors. And that made the score about as “self-serving” as the most corrupt lobbying I’d ever seen.
Therefore, I was a little skeptical the next year when IFF played a major role in killing SJR 101, an amendment implementing the “temperance language” of Idaho’s constitution when it came to legalizing drugs in Idaho. IFF managed to kill the measure in the House.
That summer, when I published my own column on why “legal marijuana is not ‘temperance,” an interesting reaction appeared on social media. The Treasurer of Kind Idaho, the organization promoting medical marijuana sales in Idaho, threw a fit. He assumed I was speaking for the IFF, and called them “turncoats,” because he had done previous “coalition building” with them.
So, once again, IFF had drawn a questionable connection to freedom and liberty, only for me to find out they had been benefitting from a “relationship” with an industry standing to profit.
The final straw was Senator Cook’s Senate Bill 1261 in 2022, giving parents more opportunity to control access to porn on their kids’ cell phones. IFF’s initial reaction showed little interest, but they later surprised the Senator with a hefty -5 rating.
At the same time, digital credit card companies that collect 1 to 2% of the $97 billion online porn industry had been shopping for a lobbyist to block the bill. Their solicitation disappeared just as the IFF came out with their hard-to-explain yet crippling anti-freedom score.
It finally dawned on me: in today’s world, if I wanted to sell avarice, drugs and immorality, I’d cloak them in 97% liberty and freedom. And then I’d force Republican “liberty-believers” to accept the entire platform — hook, line, and stinkers.
And I’d have exactly the racket existing today.
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