I have a friend who says he is against big government, big labor and big business, not necessarily in that order.

My response is that you can't be against all three of those things, yet still live in a big country. The nation that our founders came up with in 1787 had about one one-hundredth as many people as the one we now inhabit, and they all lived in the same time zone.Most of them worked for themselves, mostly as farmers or artisans, and nearly all of them were literate and involved with what was happening in the new nation.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/colonies.gif"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1313" title="colonies" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/colonies-300x169.gif" alt="" width="300" height="169" /></a>Since the government wanted to settle the West (which at that time meant Ohio), there was plenty of land available to anyone who wanted it. All they had to do was agree to homestead it for a certain length of time.

Everybody worked.

And if you couldn't make it where you were, all you had to do was keep moving west -- to the frontier.

Most people didn't have debts, and except for purchasing land, most people wouldn't have dreamed of incurring debt unless it was absolutely necessary.

They worked for themselves, their families and their neighbors to make their community a better place. They weren't working to drive someone's stock portfolio upward. There were two things that are killing our society now that just weren't major factors then.

One is mass media and the other is corporations.

Sure, there were newspapers to get information to people, but not only wasn't there television, radio, movies or Internet, most folks didn't even own books.

Yes, there were some corporations, but none like the ones that came along with the Industrial Revolution. None like the ones that practically demanded we change the way we educate people so that they could have plenty of obedient workers.

Educator John Taylor Gatto, one of the foremost critics of the way we run our educational factories, aka schools, had a lot of interesting quotes, but this is one of my favorites:

<em>"...good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone."</em>

It has been a long time since we were free people in control of our own destinies, but what the right-wing Teabaggers want in terms of government won't make us any more free.

Face it, most of our lack of freedom has nothing to do with big government. Most people's chains are forged by their employers and their creditors.

Big business.

Big rich.

As for big labor, it never competed on an even field, and most of the sectors in which it once mattered either don't exist anymore -- or are no longer unionized.

If you want to be free, tell yourself you're not going to participate in the consumer society except when absolutely necessary.

In other words, stop buying their crap.

Then you've taken a big step in the right direction.

Live for love and happiness, not for a new car or a bigger television.

If you buy only what you need and not what you merely want, you're on your way to true freedom.

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