“Know your rights!” That is an order.

I am a very selfish man. The reason that I would like for everyone to know his or her rights and know how to assume the powers to exercise those rights, is because that is the only way my rights can be protected.

We must be able to exercise our rights. If a thug with a gun enters your home, and you are unarmed, you do not have the power to exercise your right to protect your property and to defend yourself and loved ones, if you have any. It makes no difference if the thug is wearing a uniform of some kind and is committing the atrocity at the behest of, and under the auspices of, a government – your absolute right to self defense cannot be exercised. You have that right, but it cannot be exercised.

The One, the Is, the All, the Power, the Author of the Universe, the Creator, by whatever name your Creator is known to you, makes little difference unless you, through the use of force, intimidation, or coercion insist that I call my Creator by the same name you have given your Creator. If you insist on that, you are interfering with my power to exercise my natural and inherent right.

You have the natural right to call your God by whatever name you choose. You may call your Creator Vishnu or Krishna, Jehovah or Allah, Henry or Georgie-Boy, it makes absolutely no difference to me as long as you do not attempt to kill me or do some other damage, because I want to name my Creator something different than the name you have given yours.

We have the right to breathe. We have the responsibility to keep on breathing.

We have the right to food. We have the responsibility to earn that food.

We have the right to shelter and clothing. We have the responsibility to provide that shelter and clothing for ourselves.

Do we have the obligation to provide for those who refuse to provide for themselves? I think not.

We have the right to decide how to dispose of our property. If we choose to help a neighbor or loved one, that is our right. We should choose. The choice should not be made by some faceless bureaucrat in Liechtenstein who thinks that he or she knows what is best for every human being on this ball of mud.

That bureaucrat has quite possibly never calloused his hands by using a shovel, or an axe. He has quite likely never been a sanitation engineer on a dairy farm, though he has learned how to sling the brown stuff. He has no concept of how the food that is served to him got to his table. He does not stand in line at the grocery store, nor wait at an airport. Boiling water would surpass his ability. Yet, he deems himself so all-knowing that he will dictate to all and sundry how to live.

If we assume the powers given to each of us to exercise our natural and inherent rights, we will be better off.

If we assume the power to exercise our natural right to travel without any licensure by any government, to our house of worship, by whatever means available, we will be better off. If we purchase a car and choose to use it, providing we harmed no one in the purchase and the use, to travel to the grocery store, and buy the week’s victuals, who rightly has the power to interfere? I say, “No one”.

By what right does a government, instituted by men, take money from one’s income to distribute to those who will not earn any income? There is no such right as that. There is power, though, Power from the threat of fines and imprisonment, and such threats are carried out daily in this nation of free men and women. The power of sending a missile from the end of a tube of steel through the air to knock one’s life out of one’s body, is an awesome power. The threat of using that power is intimidating. It could be called a terror.

However awesome that power might be, though, it cannot be compared to the awesome power of the Creator, by whatever name you might address him.

Assume the power. Exercise your rights.

Do people sometimes forget that we are all individuals with common goals, diverse circumstances, and unique perspectives? In many situations this is the case. The more governments, both local and national, expand in size and scope, the more politics become a game of winning and losing rather than representation of the people, providing individual freedom and choice, and encouraging local solutions and creativity. The world faces no shortages of problems, but the solution does not, as often believed, lie in continued centralized power of government, but increased freedom on a local level.

As centralized representatives are empowered with more responsibilities, their ability to directly and effectively represent their constituency decreases. Certainly it is more difficult to directly represent 200 million people than it is to represent 100 people. Such power maintained by a select few opens the door to lobbyists, special interests, and privileged groups who seek to grab a portion of that extraordinary power in order to gain an unnatural advantage over fellow individuals. In 2008 alone, 14,808 lobbyists contributed $3.3 billion to government. In such a scenario, who receives more direct treatment, the 14,808 lobbyists or 14,808 individual citizens? A large government is easily influenced not by individual citizens, but by large and privileged groups with the means to essentially bribe those in control, thus decreasing the power of individuals over our government. Central policies simply can’t represent the unique needs of local communities, towns, and counties.

As governments centralize and expand in power, the power and freedom of individuals decreases. It is not necessary to increase our individual abilities through a complex system managed by far-off politicians. In fact, all that is necessary is a simple concept that is commonly blurred or forgotten: freedom. Freedom is the only “system” that sees all individuals as naturally equal; freedom is based on individual, not central, power, and recognizes that we, the people, can solve our dilemmas free of constraint, force, and coercion. Freedom provides individuals the opportunity to keep the full fruits of their labor and appropriate their money to where they see fit, whether it be to the elderly, those in need of food, or any other service. The element of choice lies with the individual, not with the power of others. Simply put, when focusing on local solutions, individuals maintain far greater freedom and influence of participation, activism, and travel (voting with their feet), than they have in a strongly centralized system.

Individuals carry the greatest initiative, responsibility, and obligation over government in their counties, towns, communities, and neighborhoods. Things would appear much differently today if individual people, rather than federal officials and bureaucrats, were the driving force behind environmental, medical, and other policies. Chances are that many communities would oppose the opening of a nearby coalmine and would work together, as individuals, to find a cleaner, sustainable energy source. People will certainly feel a greater sense of charity and responsibility if they see or know people in their town who need but can’t afford health care. People are simply connected to something that they personally understand, see, and love, and will work together to protect and improve such a place. This is a basic world where solutions are based not on conflict and political gain, but community involvement and cooperation.

A locally managed government created to represent and serve the people fully can only function with an informed and active public. To do my own part in bringing this about, I developed Freedom Chatter in March 2009 with the slogan, “Involve, Interact, Inform.” Freedom Chatter is an ongoing project of mine with the objective to bring together a community of contributors and excited individuals eager to analyze all areas of business, economics, and public policy. Freedom Chatter recognizes the inherent qualities of human nature to be creative, diverse, and develop original ideas; it is unreasonable to expect everyone to subscribe to one viewpoint or ideology, whether it is on a local or national scale. By acknowledging the power and creativity each one of us carries locally as individuals and utilizing our ability to interact and inform, a rebirth in freedom, prosperity, and happiness is well within reach.

Originally written as a college application essay in November 2009.

The FDIC attempts to universalize risk in banking. Regardless of whether or not you even deposit money in a financial institution, whether or not you discriminate between different banks and the practices thereof, we are forced into subsidizing risk through government deposit insurance. The FDIC normally guarantees deposit insurance up to $100,000, while the insurance temporarily covers $250,000 of deposits until 2013. It does not take much to realize that bank management will make different decisions, pursue riskier ventures, and accept less financially-qualified clients if they know the FDIC has their back. The moral hazard that comes with the FDIC is undeniable.

The main flaw with the FDIC and the current banking system is that the control does not lie with the individual. Government’s history in banking has amounted to protecting banks, offering special and unnatural privileges to financial institutions (what other industry has a “lender of last resort” and a government program to help pay for risk?), and diminishing the regulatory power of the individual. A free market encourages and generally requires individual initiative, research, and understanding of the product, all of which the FDIC has assumed as its proper role.

What other industry needs a government agency to fall back on if they make unsustainable and irrational decisions? The truth is that the FDIC’s role is nothing more than to bail out bad management decisions and an inefficiently run business. Can you imagine what such a system would have done to an industry like technology? Tech companies would have much less incentive to improve their products if they knew they had the federal government guaranteeing major consumer losses.

By attempting to cover different risks in banking, the FDIC removes the incentives of banks to avoid those risks. It removes the incentive for individuals to scrutinize their potential banking options more carefully. If you know that all or the majority of your deposit is insured by the government, why bother with the details of bank management, financial health, etc.? Like economist Peter Schiff said, people spend more time researching a toaster than they do opening a bank account.

The FDIC’s softening or total removal of incentives to avoid and search for risk also slows the development of other options to banking. The amount of banks and the style with which they operate has not significantly changed since the FDIC came into existence in the 1930s. Nearly any other industry you can think of has undergone some major changes in operation over the past seventy years, while banking is essentially the same.

The FDIC locks people and businesses into a certain style of banking. (What banks and individuals wouldn’t want government guarantees of deposit insurance?) This may be fine and dandy for a time, but it stalls the development of what could be much more sustainable and sensible financial options for individuals, such as credit unions. With government regulators and bureaucrats calling the shots, rather than the free individuals of the country, new developments that would better serve the individual have been heavily limited and discouraged.

The slightly hilarious part is that in the event of a true banking meltdown, the FDIC wouldn’t have near the amount of necessary funds to ensure depositors got their money back. According to the FDIC’s own website, they manage an “insurance fund” of more than “$52.8 billion,” yet the agency “insures more than $4.3 trillion of deposits in 8,494 U.S. banks and thrifts.” Let’s see… $52.8 billion of funds to cover $4.3 trillion of deposits. Yes, the FDIC carries enough cash to cover a whopping 1.23% of the total deposits that it claims to insure.

The FDIC does not expand the power of the individual to make his own choices in the marketplace; it builds corporate loyalty to government standards, not individual standards. The problem with the banking system to begin with was the neglect of the individual’s regulatory abilities, the FDIC is simply an expansion of that unfortunate trend. The folly of the modern banking system is that it does not encourage individual initiative, research, and involvement in banking as a free market system would.

Rather than encourage free and alternative choices like individual deposit insurance plans, community credit unions (where individuals have a stake in where their deposits are spent), or discretion as to where one saves or invests their hard-earned money, we have consistently moved toward a centralized, bureaucratized, planned banking system. Such a system makes it extremely difficult for individuals to effect real change with their own local regulatory power, and prevents a truly sustainable and involved financial industry from coming about. Only the free market can guarantee a system swayed not by the government, but by free men and women exercising their ultimate regulatory authority as individuals.

• Click here for Part 1.