Have you ever read George Orwell’s 1984? If not, or if you just want to refresh your memory, it’s online right here. It vividly portrays the price we pay when we let our freedom slip away.

Conversely, this article by Claire Wolfe portrays the price we pay to keep our freedom. (Thanks to my husband for this one.) And in case you’re wondering? This article was published in July 2001 – that’s before 9/11, before the Patriot Act, before Iraq, before the Wall St. bailout. Here are a couple excerpts, but the whole article is worth your time.

Freedom’s a nice luxury, of course. If you were free you wouldn’t be a dependent, a collaborator, or a victim of an aggressive government. You’d be able to live and think as you saw fit, as long as you respected others right to do the same. Your life wouldn’t be dedicated to “compliance” (or else) with any old random order written by any old random bureaucrat. You’d support the causes and people you value, not the causes and people some interest group wants to force you to support with your money, your labor, and your life.

Wow, what a rush that would be.

But you can‘t do that, these days. They won‘t let you. So why even try? And look at all the reasons not to try!

• Freedom is Dull …
• Freedom is Risky …
• Freedom makes you a freak …
• Freedom’s a hopeless cause …

Okay, maybe there’s one reason to bother with freedom. Just one.

Because if you don’t free yourself you’ll be a nice, comfortable, happy slave. If you don’t fight for freedom your children will be slightly less comfortable slaves, wearing their little ID-number tattoos under their skin as they walk past the retina-scanners and body x-rays to go to work, submitting numbly as robots armed with pain rays arrest them after computers diagnose their “suspicious“ behavior patterns, stumbling through their therapeutically controlled lives. Your dependency, your collaboration, your tacit agreement with the goals of tyrants will have made it inevitable.

And your grandchildren will …