I believe that freedom is the gift of God.  But freedom is a messy affair.  Because people are imperfect, their exercise of freedom is imperfect.  Because all people are uniquely different as well as imperfect, the individual exercise of freedom invariably leads to inequalities among people.  Because freedom is messy and imperfect and leads to inequalities among people, there are many who can and do advance a thousand plausible-sounding arguments for why freedom doesn't work; why it must be regulated, limited, restricted, licensed, and ultimately done away with; and why government must intervene and impose a collective equality.  The well intended and tyrants alike have been making such arguments from the beginning of time.  But the yearning for liberty is planted in the human soul by our Creator: "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" (2 Corinthians 3:17).  And so, the whole history of mankind has been one long repetitive tale of tyranny, of human misery, and of the struggle to be free.

Then came America.  The American republic was founded on a revolutionary idea: that the rights of man are endowed upon him by his Creator, that those rights are therefore inalienable, and that the legitimate purpose of government is to protect and preserve those rights.  America became the land of the free.  And millions flocked to her shores believing that freedom, messy and imperfect though it may be, would permit them to make a better life than the one they left behind.

Freedom does work.  America, with all her imperfections, is proof of that.  American democracy, American capitalism, has lifted millions upon millions of people out of slavery and poverty, my Irish ancestors being among them.  Socialism is not freedom.  Socialism is the abandonment of freedom, the destruction of free agency.  Socialism does not work.  It cannot work because it is contrary to human nature, and, as such, it destroys the soul and ultimately renders men morally impotent.  Worse, the socialist idea has spawned governments that have murdered tens of millions of people in just the last one hundred years.

The presidential election this year is a choice between freedom and the socialist idea.

I didn't vote for Donald Trump in 2016.  Didn't know him.  Didn't like him.  Didn't trust him.  Accordingly, I voted third party.  But as I observed him as president, I began to notice that every policy, every initiative that President Trump stood for and pursued is a policy that advances or restores freedom to the individual citizen: lower taxes, less government regulation, abundant energy at cheaper prices.  These policies lead to a better economy with much lower unemployment which, in turn, have restored greater freedom to millions of Americans.  He has stood firmly for life.  He stands firmly for the Second Amendment.  He has not involved us in any new wars and is winding down our involvement in the ones that have been dragging on for decades.  He is successfully pursuing peace in the Middle East, which he gets no credit for.  Despite of the hell they have heaped on this man, he has accomplished more substantive good in four years than the last four presidents combined in the prior twenty-eight years.

The pattern of Trump policies has consistently favored the enhancement of individual sovereignty, individual liberty, and individual agency.  In virtually every policy he has pursued, he has reversed, rolled back, or diminished policies that make the State the final arbiter in matters that should be left to individual choice.  He is rapidly dissolving the kind of invasive governmental sludge that the Joe Bidens of this world have been legislating into every detail of our lives for the past 100 years.  Biden is a statist, a collectivist, a big government guy.  Trump, while sometimes not a gentleman, instinctively advocates, advances, and restores fundamental principles of liberty.  To my great surprise and appreciation, he has become the president I have always voted for but never got.

If the courage and energy to stand for freedom and against the socialist idea, even under a withering assault day after day, year after year, is what one is looking for in a president, then President Donald Trump has been truly magnificent.  Donald Trump is the freedom president.  Next week, I intend to cast my first ever vote for Donald Trump.

Image: Pixabay.