I began voting Libertarian when I realized that both Indiana General Assembly and Congress had strayed from their sole purpose to secure our natural rights and were violating them on behalf of special interest groups, including people in government.

For example, income tax violates at least three of our natural rights: our rights to work, to contract and to exclusive possession of our property. If we still exercised these rights, we could choose to work without first presenting a Social Security number. We would not be required to sign forms and report to government every year, and we would take home all of our pay.

Most economic monopolies would not exist if our governments respected our natural rights to contract. We could hire whom we wanted to represent us in court, teach our children, or relieve our pain – based on their background, education and experience – not on government’s meaningless, biased and often dangerous stamps of approval.

In a world that respected our choices, there would be no licensed health-care monopoly, which uses government to protect and insulate itself from 100,000 people it negligently kills each year. There would also be no education monopoly, run by teachers unions, to march our children into mediocrity. Injustice and ignorance are just two of consequences when special interest groups use government to trample upon others’ rightful choices.

So hear it from a government major: Our state and federal governments’ sole legitimate function is to aid us in self-defending our own natural unalienable rights, and every single one of them is doing a horrible job at it. Almost every piece of modern legislation violates someone’s natural rights, which all governments long ago promised to protect.

This is all because our current political leaders know less about purpose of government than you do right now.

Raising Indiana’s sales tax by 20 percent last year and my property taxes by 50 percent this year did little to help poor Hoosiers, you or me. Most poor people do not gain with anyone’s higher taxes. The poor pay a higher percentage of their income in sales tax than wealthier people. The poor pay higher property taxes when their rents rise.

Thanks to way we vote, we work longer and longer each year to pay for others to spend our hard-earned money inefficiently and unwisely. This goes against best economic wisdom. Smith told us that we’d be much wealthier as a nation, and our poor would be better off, if we took economic decisions away from our relatively few leaders and returned it to individuals who earned money, even if selfishness drives their spending.

Individuals spend their own money more wisely than government bureaucrats spend money for them. Individuals spend their dollars to buy better goods and services. They get more results for each dollar they give to private charity than government welfare programs. Money in competitive private sector is almost always more wisely and effectively used than giving it to a government.

But worse, government jobs come at expense of others’ productivity and are economically unproductive. Government jobs produce no wealth, which is created only by selling products and services that people want to buy. This means that governments – beyond their essential judicial, electoral and record keeping rolls – are pure dead weight on productivity and wealth of nations.

Politicians should take heed of Adam Smith’s moral and economic ideas. Smaller governments – and fewer decisions by chosen few – are essential for more job creation, greater prosperity, better use of money and more community wealth. Wealth is best assured – not by a new government program – but by more economic freedom from government.