We are not free and that is why we are not happy!

When you are a kid, you don't know much about the world. If you are lucky, you live in a cocoon that your parents provide for you. Within this cocoon, you have to play by their rules, which in the main are designed to keep the household a good place to live and help you as a child, begin to understand what life is all about.

After a while, you start seeing and hearing about things that your parents didn't tell you about. Things that sound fun or exciting. Even the best parents in the world can't prepare their children for everything; So as they get older, most children start making their own rules up. Sometimes these rules clash with the parents and for this reason, most young adults want to move on from the nest and have more control over their own lives.

If you are lucky, your parents cared for you and made rules to protect you. Their intentions were almost always good. Even at this very local, one to one level though, they realise that a young adult will want to make their own way one day. The best of parents knows when to let go. The worst don't and quite often drive their children out on bad terms.

Government likes to think of itself as the country's parent and the population its children. I am pretty sure that a lot of people that go into government, probably do it for good wholesome reasons. They truly believe that the laws, principles and morals that they hold dear are what will be best for people in the end.

Government will never be a good parent though. It is much more complex than that one to one relationship, that even on that simple level can go wrong sometimes. As soon as you start grouping lots of people together, bad things start to happen. There are many malign influences that get applied to the individuals that make up a government. They are in no particular order

Personal selfishness. When being in government becomes your career, sometimes you will put career before principles, that is human nature.

Special interests. As soon as big money, big corporations, big anything realises whose strings to pull, they will do all they can to pull them. That means huge temptation to do not what is right for all, but what is right for a very few select interests.

Desperation. Once people realise that they are very small cogs, in a very large, dangerous and complex machine, they suddenly start losing sight of what is right. Suddenly the ends will justify the means and that includes lying, cheating and other immoral behavior.

The machine taking over. How many times have you heard the words "There is nothing I can do about it, it is the way things are"? I hear it all the time in all walks of life. When the machine takes over, you are in deep problems.

Add all of these things together and the end result is a distant, soulless and uncontrollable entity, that rewards greed, ruthlessness and deviousness. The bigger the entity is, the worse it will get. The pole will get greasier and the rewards for climbing it, that much more tempting. Only the very worst kind of liar, cheat and power-monger will have any chance of making it to the top.

To make things worse, you then have the old adage that power corrupts that comes into play. Therefore, you have people who once went into it with best intentions, being turned into what they once despised. At this point you then have alliances formed and anyone who doesn't play the game hard and brutally is quickly eliminated.

Because of this, those that remain, want to make sure they are rewarded for serving to that point. Self preservation, whether that be for personal reasons, or the quickly fading notion of being able to drive good into the beast again, even if it means becoming evil, to beat evil. This is why it is very, very difficult to break through into politics, unless you are willing to do as you are told and play along with the establishment game.

Sadly this isn't restricted to government alone. Business interests, media, pressure groups, you name it, all get caught up in the same game. There may not be any one single driving force or game-plan, though there will certainly be those with the power to push the game in a direction they deem helpful to their goals.

So as I was saying at the start, as normal people we find ourselves in a sticky position. We all want to live our lives, with minimal interference from others. We certainly don't like having the fruits of our labour being taken from us. We certainly dislike it when a faceless bureaucracy makes out lives difficult. We all probably moan when something we like doing is made more expensive, or worse banned.

We are now at a point in Britain, where we are taxed more than ever. We have more rules and regulations than ever before, spewing out of the machine and what's worse, funded by us again. More and more activities are being restricted or banned outright. Activities that hurt no one, other than ourselves. Smoking for example, or drinking, or even eating certain foods. The government thinks it knows best and will use the full force of the machine against us to make us look after ourselves.

What is even worse, is there doesn't seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel. Indeed, it is actually getting darker and darker as more freedoms are ripped away, more money is taken from us and worst of all, the small levers we all do have on "democracy" are dismantled. The reason we are going to hell, is because the machine has taken over. The solution therefore is not to expand the machine and give it even more powers.

Notions of one government controlling Europe, never-mind the world, should drive fear into everyone's heart. This is the dream of tyrants and fascists throughout the ages. Total control over more and more people, with those same people having less and less means to stop them. Imagine the glee a Hitler, Stalin or any other dictator of the past would have had with the following weapons at his disposal.

Cameras on every street, watching our every move, linked to huge databases with ever more intelligent software to utilise that data. Paid for by the people they are controlling themselves.

ID cards forced on people, with every biometric stored and linked to a database that grows with more information all the time. A system that will eventually leave the individual at the total mercy of the system. Without your ID card, you are nothing. You can be denied services from all but the black market. Therefore, you will become a criminal, the minute you don't agree with the system. Imagine how the Jews would have felt about that in Nazi Germany! All at the people's expense of course.

With the system fully locked in, all of those thousands of rules and regulations can be enforced to the nth degree. Indeed they can increase them, or even make them up on the fly if need be. What are you going to do about it? Remember, your right to live can be taken away just like that.

The reason people are becoming less happy, is because we are not free. We are less free than any British person has ever been before. The odds are stacked against us, the machine is already fully functioning, but the longer we leave it, the more pain we will suffer and the harder it will be for our children to escape an even worse fate.

It doesn't have to be this way. Everyone has to look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves why they continue to support the status quo. The answer is hard to stomach for most, as there is a slice of the evil that makes the machine in every one of us. We all like to think we know what is best. We all like to have our own way. We are human beings and we all have the same flaws, more or less.

Only when we stop demanding that others support our exact choices and worse, outsource the job of enforcing these rules to others, will we have a chance of pulling back from the brink. Only when we don't expect government to run our and others lives, will we start to scale it back to a level where it is useful, not dangerous. Only when we start taking responsibility for our lives, will we then be in a position to REALLY help others. That means using our own money to help those in real need, rather than expecting the government to do it, using money stolen from others. There is no such thing as others, only us in the end!

There is only one cog in the system that realises this. That cog being the Libertarian movement. The sooner we all back freedom, is the moment responsibility will return and happiness will follow not long after.

Will that mean bad things never happen? Hell no. You simply can't stop it completely, but you can isolate it and give everyone the least excuse to do bad things and THEN you can truly have a rule of law that punishes evil. Evil being people hurting others, for no good reason. That includes hurting them or stealing from them.

The reason the house is sinking isn't the brickwork, the roof, the decoration or the plumbing. It is the foundations of fascism need to be ripped out and replaced with freedom!