I remember my Mother’s apoplexy when I brought home a great economic treatise during my undergraduate days at the University of Missouri. My major professor was a Department of Agriculture Economist six months BEFORE Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency, and was on the President’s Counsel of Economic Advisors for Roosevelt. He was a Democrat’s democrat, and what I’d written pleased him.

In my sophisticated tome—which proved I had learned how to incorporate the heady language used no where else but in academia—-I argued about the need for increased governmental control of the commodities markets to insure a healthy agricultural industry. But my well-articulated piece evidenced my own lack of understanding of the American ideal—or the liberal brainwashing of academia, as my mother put it. I was arguing from the point of view that the Republic’s Holy Grail was well regulated markets. It isn’t. The Holy Grail of America is freedom; to answer to no man save God, and Him only if you choose—at least temporarily.

We live in the worst country of the world; except for all the rest, and that makes America the best. It’s the best because it stands for freedom above all else. Freedom to go where you want, and do what you want. Freedom to produce what you want, or nothing at all. Freedom to benefit from, or suffer the consequences of our actions. Freedom that extends endlessly, up to the point that exercising it interferes with the freedom of another.

There’s something more important than federal price support for commodities and orderly markets—freedom!

My friend and attorney Jillian Sidoti reminds me often of Thomas Jefferson’s words, “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.”

We’d all do well to remember that the foundational principle of our democracy is freedom. Everything else is subservient to that.