The 4th of July is a time for celebrating our independence as a nation as well as the freedoms we share as American citizens. When the Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, three inalienable rights were mentioned, namely: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The one that concerns me the most today is liberty. Few Americans today understand the true nature of liberty and liberty continues to erode from American society.

Few Americans today understand the true nature of liberty because they erroneously associate the word with a license to do whatever one wishes. For example, a popular Internet meme today defines liberty as “The power to live as one wishes.” However, careful examination of American history reveals that liberty has never been construed to mean the freedom to do whatever one pleases.

During the Colonial Era John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony defined the nature of liberty which would later become the standard in American jurisprudence. In 1645 Winthrop made an important distinction between natural liberty and civil liberty. Natural liberty, he said, refers to that which is common to man and beast and means doing whatever one wishes. Concerning natural liberty, Winthrop said, “The maintaining of this liberty makes men grow more evil and in time worse than brute beasts.” Consequently, throughout American history it has always been accepted that moral evils should be legislated against.

Civil liberty, on the other hand, Winthrop said, is liberty that is constrained by authority. Civil liberty is liberty within the confines of the law. Winthrop said, “This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority,” and “…it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest.” Winthrop went on to compare civil liberty to the quiet and willful submission that the Church has to Christ and that a wife has to her loving husband. So, when governments act benevolently towards their citizens in the way that Christ does to the church and that a loving husband does towards his wife, obedience naturally follows and there is little need for law.

It is only within the context of civil liberty that governments should ever be restrained. It is a self-evident truth that governments should restrain immorality, but what about laws that don’t address any particular moral evil? A stop sign, for example, lawfully exists to regulate the flow of traffic, yet it does not address any particular moral evil, and most of us would agree that governments should not erect any more stop signs than what are necessary to regulate the flow of traffic and to ensure public safety.

Governments have a natural tendency to slowly erode away our civil liberties. This is usually done by well-intentioned legislators who simply want to fix a problem, but the result is the incremental loss of our freedoms over time. For example, more than 600 bills get introduced in the Nebraska State Legislature each year and this year 103 of them made their way to the Governor’s desk to be signed into law. Each time the Governor signs a bill into law, it results in a small loss of liberty for the people.

By far, the largest loss of liberty through legislative action comes through taxation. Ever since the people of Nebraska changed the tax code by amending the state constitution back in 1967, the State Legislature has been in the business of eroding the economic liberty of its citizens. For example, every time a person has to pay $100 more in taxes than the year before, he or she loses the freedom to decide how to spend that money. That individual then has to make a choice between working more hours to make up the difference or suffering the loss of income. Working to pay taxes is a form of slavery where the government acts as the slave owner, and that is exactly how more and more Nebraskans are beginning to feel towards their state and local governments.

The Governor intends to call the members of the Legislature back to Lincoln for a special session at the end of July to deal with this over-burdening tax problem. The goal of that special session should be to restore economic liberty back to the people of Nebraska. True economic liberty happens by restraining the government’s power to tax the people, and this is accomplished best when we put the people, not the government, in charge of how much money they pay in taxes every year. That is what the EPIC Option Consumption Tax is designed to do. Only by putting more money into the pockets of the citizens can governments enable their citizens to pursue that third inalienable right, the right to pursue happiness.