Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

June 3, 2011

Three private citizens in Orlando, Florida have been arrested for the supposed offense of feeding homeless and hungry people without government permission.

On the other end of the continent, police and emergency personnel in Alameda, California watched from the shore while a 52-year-old man named Raymond Zack waded into the ocean and drowned. The man stood in neck-deep water for roughly two hours.

According to police Lt. Sean Lynch, the government personnel didn?t intervene because the clearly suicidal man was ?potentially violent,? and thus posed a potential risk to the highly-trained, lavishly compensated, and union-protected ?first responders.?
Apparently, that peril persisted even after the man was dead, since it fell to a passer-by to retrieve the body from the surf.

The spectators in Alameda are presumably paid to take some modest risks to help others, but their government positions effectively insulate them from responsibility to do so. The members of Orlando?s Food Not Bombs, by way of contrast, feed people out of a sense of moral responsibility ? and yet were hauled off to jail for lack of official permits.

The juxtaposition of those events tells us everything we need to know about the nature of political government.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.