Have you heard about the angry un-American mobs who are protesting what the government is proposing to do?  Of course you have, because it happens during every administration.

Now that Obama is President, those who don't want nationalized health care should just shut up and let Congress do what the majority want.  Of course, when George Bush was President, there were other angry mobs who protested the start of the War in Iraq.  When they were protesting, many on the right said that they were un-American for not supporting the troops.  Do you remember when Social Security reform was top on the agenda?  I was at a Sensenbrenner town hall meeting where an entire union group showed up to ask the same questions over and over again into a microphone... and it wasn't exactly friendly.

Now that Obama is President, the fact that people are protesting is stirring fear that perhaps it will lead to an assassination, or maybe even an Oklahoma City style bombing.  Of course, when people were protesting under the Bush Administration, protesters were openly calling for soldiers to kill their officers.  There were even cases where soldiers were killed by protesters.  Let's not forget all the Bush=Hitler talk that went on.  What about the eco-terrorism that occurs under the extreme left?  Maybe arson is just considered too small to worry about.

Perhaps you're noticing a theme here.  When "our guy" is in charge, then democracy is all about the will of the majority over the minority.  We won the election, so we get to do whatever we want.  You know... it's supposed to taste like a sh*t taco.  When "their guy" is in charge, then we have a right to protest.  After all, dissent is the highest form of patriotism!  When their guys are protesting, they are unruly mobs, who make us fearful that they might engage in some sort of terrorism.  When our guys are protesting, they are community organizers.  When one administration asks that people report to the government anyone who is spreading what they consider "disinformation", it is considered a breach of privacy and socialism!  When a different administration asks the NSA to do it... well... that's different.

Now some of these people are just plain crazy.  People who would torch other people's homes, or shoot soldiers "in protest" of anything, are crazy to say the least, and often times are murderous psychopaths.  The fact that these extreme actions are used by someone else as somehow representative of other more mainstream views is simply disingenuous, pandering and fear mongering behavior.

But for the rest, these protests (no matter who the protesters are) show a reasonable fear by a minority group that those in the majority will use the power of government against them.  As more and more power becomes vested in the government, these protests will naturally increase.  This happens in France all the time, and may people believe that if we follow the French model in health care, then the French model of political protest will soon follow.

But the answer here is not to muzzle the protesters.  The answer is not to question the patriotism of those who speak out, and then push through more increases in government power.  The answer is to put control of people's lives back in the hands of those people.  The answer is to reduce what government does for us, so that we can do it ourselves.  The answer is to shrink the sphere of government influence, in both our economic and personal lives.  As F.A. Hayek once penned:

Nothing makes conditions more unbearable than the knowledge that no effort of ours can change them; and even if we should never have the strength of mind to make the necessary sacrifice, the knowledge that we could escape if we only stove hard enough makes many otherwise intolerable positions bearable.

We protest because we fear losing, more than anything else, the chance to change our situation using our own will.  Both sides of the aisle have experienced it... and yet both sides seem to forget what it was like when the shoe was on the other foot.