Many of those who agree that freedom should be the rule will endorse social security, Medicare, trips to the moon, subsidies, on and on.

Few, indeed, seem able or willing to apply the proposition in their workaday world. They may give lip service to freedom as an ideal concept but will rarely adopt it as a mode of living.

In this context, perfect freedom is that state of affairs in which there is no exercise of man-concocted restraints against the release of creative energy. Freedom can be said to wax or wane as such restraints diminish or increase.

Freedom can no more rule or reign over man kind than can fresh air.

The phrase, "Let freedom reign," does not mean that freedom should rule in the dictatorial sense; that would be a contradiction in terms. It means, instead, let freedom be the rule as the alternative to persons who would rule or reign.

When men in positions of political, professional, religious, educational, and business leadership give more heed to desires of the flesh and to expediencies of the moment than to moral and spiritual principles, the bad ideas proliferate; they come out of the heads of men as termites from a rotten stump.

Otherwise, your good efforts will be wasted in the hopeless cause of socialism and the welfare state.

If we make the simple concession that noone should be forced to labor for no return, then the absurdity of socialized medicine is clear. If one forced to perform their services for nothing, as non patients presently are forced to pay for services not received, no person would choose medicine as a career.

Your services are a scarce economic resource, and precisely because of that scarcity should be priced and otherwise regulated by the laws of supply and demand and open competition, as should every other valuable and scarce commodity or service.

When the notion that a wish is a right is put in to effect by police force -- the only way it can be done -- then specialization is no longer guided by consumer wishes nor are the terms of exchange.

Others tend to encourage me to specialize at what is of value to them, and I tend to encourage them to specialize at what is of value to me. This is how people in a free society exert their wishes.

None of us can exist solely by his own efforts, so each of us specializes according to his bent or talents, and whether we prosper or not is substantially determined by what and how much others will give in exchange for what we have to offer. In a free society, that is!

The democratic majority-vote merely means that might -- the overwhelming number -- makes right. The coercive majority deserves no more approval than does the dictator who uses his might to make right.

Most of them have been conjured up to catch the eye or imagination of the people just as advertisers concoct fancy names for soap. But by what ever name, it's still soap; and by whatever name, all governmental ownership and control of creative activities is still socialism!

Limited government gives way to unlimited government.

The ideal of limited government -- codifying and enforcing the taboos, that is, inhibiting destructive actions and defending the life and livelihood of all -- gets less and less attention as government assumes the managemen to creative activities.

The details of how government runs my life fail to interest me; I am concerned with one fact: does it or does it not run my life?

While governments have varying methods of organization for owning and controlling the means and results of production, such control is of the essence of socialism; the rest is window dressing.

Socialism is always a statist or interventionist way of life; it has a double-barreled definition: government owner-ship and control of the means of production and/or the results of production. Put another way, it is the planned economy and/or the welfare state. The two, as a rule, go hand in hand; indeed, it is next to impossible to practice either without the other.

At the outset, let me clarify one point: cooperative activities unrelated to government do not fall with in my definition of socialism; it is the collectivization by government force that qualifies as socialism.