Below: "The Long Hard Climb": Marc Emery and Robert Metz on the subject of creating a new political choice in the marketplace -- Freedom Party. (Behind the News, CFPL TV London, November 3, 1988) |
Marc Emery: "We don't like to be beggars, like political
parties are assumed to be. We like to be producers, a
goods provider. Somebody who's going to give you some
value for what it is we're asking you to give us.
"Everything that has to survive has got to be treated like a business. Even in politics, you've got to provide your market, the public, with something they can use, something they want, something they will come back for. "People are interested in whatever they can get out of the system with the least effort. And the government is more than happy to give them that, rather tragically. But a lot of people resist the responsibility of their own decisions. They'd rather say 'Oh if I screw up, somebody else gets to hold the bag. But if I do well, then I want to keep it all.' "People hate paying taxes, but they don't want to stop the government spending that they see themselves benefitting from. Yet they're identical. They're the same thing. You can't lower taxes without cutting government spending. Everybody wants lower taxes, but nobody wants to cut back at feeding at the trough --- the gravy train of government spending. These two are related. We can't live like this for long without something being destroyed. And likely it's our own future that's being destroyed --- all the choices going away, all the money going away. "But it's a long haul. The public has been weaned like drug addicts on government spending, and government programs, and promises." |
Robert Metz: "Freedom in a political context means only that you're free from the coercive force of government to predetermine your choices. It doesn't mean you're free from your obligations to your landlord, or free from your obligations to your family, or to your job or to any of those things. Those are obligations that each of us in the course of our lives assume either directly or indirectly on a voluntary basis. That's the whole point of freedom. Freedom in itself, if it's properly defined, limits the action of an individual within a free society. "In other words, I can't be free unless you are free, unless each individual is free. Otherwise freedom has no meaning." |
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last updated on April 28, 2002