How can North Carolina ensure that each adult is free to direct and enrich their life?
- Freedom is a living inheritance —a set of rights and moral responsibilities that let people direct their own lives without permission.
- We experience liberty often, yet rarely adequately treasure it.
- North Carolina must hold those principles again, honoring the birthrights protected by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments as well as the moral foundation necessary to best serve people.
- Today, we must also defend the cultural, recreational, and medical freedoms that allow individuals to flourish in ways the Founders never saw.
Honoring Your Civil Liberties And The Ninth Amendment
The United States and North Carolina Constitutions lay out a bold and pragmatic philosophy in their preambles. They teach that a stable, united society marked by justice, tranquility, common defense, and shared prosperity depends on protecting “liberty.”
Regardless of category, our liberties are the socially recognized “rights” that allow each of us to make autonomous decisions and breathe easy. The Ninth Amendment reminds us that people always have more rights than the federal government happens to list. Thus, North Carolina must protect our many liberties.
The Moral Foundation Of A Free Society
A moral society does not demand inhumane suffering of some to secure the happiness of everyone else. Instead, it asks many of us to shoulder a few minimal civic duties.
To give some examples, a taxpayer contributing only the bare minimum and a sheriff serving a term are not victims. They are honorable participants in the shared work of protecting liberty —work that must never be undermined by private and foreign powers tempted to corrupt or betray the government. Even when such duties are inconvenient, they are nothing like the grim alternatives of societies that crush an unlucky lot.
Dusting Off The Constitution
Elsewhere, I have spoken about parental rights, justice system rights, and more, but there are still much that belong to us.
The freedom-preserving features within the US Constitution, Bill of Rights, and later Amendments need a staunch defender to be more than words on paper. You deserve your right to interstate travel and commerce, regional representation, expression, association and peaceful opposition, religion and conscience, property ownership, privacy, due process, fair trials, transparency, decentralized nearer government, equal protection, and citizenship.
Why The Right To Bear Arms Is Essential To A Free Society
The right to bear arms is frequently misunderstood. The phrasing in our Constitution of “shall not be infringed” intentionally does not permit exceptions.
The Founding Fathers believed that widespread ownership of swords, firearms, and other weapons acted as a defense against injustice on a personal level as well as against oppressive scheming on a societal scale. Reminding government that they serve us requires a maximal allowance of citizens owning weapons and coordinating in parity with our military.
History repeatedly shows that when a government holds a monopoly on advanced force, the temptation to abuse that power grows and the people lose their protection against tyranny.
Protections For A New Age
You deserve the liberty to participate in culture: whether by dancing, getting a tattoo, camping under the stars, or simply wearing a bikini at the beach. Adults should be free to enjoy recreational activities, consent to experimental medical treatments, and access all public knowledge (including the records of government activity).
You deserve a government that limits itself in order to preserve “self-governance” —the essence of a free society. Thus, a government that is honest, permissive of secession, clearly constrained, internally checked, representative, decentralized, and lean in its focus rarely allows corruption, treason, and collusion to take root. Above all, you deserve the liberty of selfhood, the enduring bulwark against slavery.
Freedom Worth Fighting For
No single term can accomplish every reform we deserve, but these are the principles that must guide our future:
- North Carolina must protect the liberties recognized in each Constitution.
- The right to own weapons, take them into public spaces, and partake in paramilitaries is sacred.
- The people must retain the ability to openly carry.
- To protect from government, we must institute term limits on elected officials and certain employees of the state.
- North Carolina must institute guardrails to prevent gerrymandering, deepen its transparency, and make it easier to run without a party affiliation.
- Reforms must treat domestic attempts to bribe, subvert, and threaten government as treason.
- To modernize, we must protect access to AI, restore the right to protest anywhere in public without a permit, and lift bans on fireworks.
- We must likewise legalize gambling, end dry ordinances, allow responsible ownership of animals, and open the door to home alcohol distilling.