As I’ve watched the Nevada ranchers protecting their grazing rights against the Bureau of Land Management military, armed with rifles and guard dogs, I thought of Hitler’s “brown shirts” harassing innocent Germans in the 1930s and 1940s.

Have we forgotten? The creation of totalitarian governments can simply be the result of a people’s “live and let live” laissez faire attitudes. Moreover, we should know that it also can happen here in the U.S., as in the Germany. If we compare our present society to those years, it’s obvious that the same rugged individualism of the past is slowly being eroded through subtle bureaucratic regulation.

This caused me to ask myself: Isn’t it only through “simple,” understandable laws of our judiciary that men and women — educated or uneducated — can get along by following the same laws based on man’s own “innate” sense of right? And armored with these understandable laws, doesn’t “self-discipline” taught in a family environment lead us to the real freedom we seek? And it also follows, that if these teachings fail, and we are not guided by our own conscience, we will empower a government to create reasons to impose more laws and regulations to guide us and control us through its bureaucracies.

In the end, these many rules and regulations, justified in the name of protecting us, will really cause elimination of the very freedoms they were created to protect. Soon, those laws — that only attorneys will understand — shall allow no “choice” in anything and our society will be changed into a mob of dependent cripples, run by bureaucratic tzars.

The new socialist elite.

Travis Williams

Sequim