As an accelerating frenzy of legislation and lawsuits suggest, we live in a time when many people assert the notion that individuals are not really responsible for their own decisions and actions.

This is absurd. Each person, and they alone, controls their own actions and decisions. They alone are responsible for their decisions and actions. No one else can be blamed.

Someone smokes a cigarette, does drugs, robs a bank, blows up a building, goes on a shooting rampage, or joins in a riot.

We are expected to believe that "society" or "big business" are somehow responsible for such actions, and that "government" should do something about it.

This "something" usually takes the form of intrusive and restrictive new laws, or the expenditure of huge amounts of money, imposed on people who had nothing to do with the actions of the individuals in question!

We are admonished to believe that the product manufacturers are at fault, or that the parents or the schoolteachers are to blame, or that the books the individuals read, the movies they saw, the games they played, the photographs they looked at, or the gun they fired, are somehow "responsible" for the individuals' behavior.

And yet, it is the individual alone who smoked the cigarettes, or did the drugs, or committed the robbery, or set off the bomb, or pulled the trigger, or joined the riot -- however foolish or wrong-headed such an action might have been in retrospect.

Certainly, others may have been responsible for having "urged", but this does not relieve the individual from being responsible for his or her own direct actions.

Many people use the term "responsibility" to imply that an obligation exists for which others must pay.

Much of the difficulty we experience in our lives today is due to the fact that all sorts of rationalizations are being conjured up to make it appear as though you and I have obligations that we never agreed to!

We are "obligated" to turn over roughly 40 percent of our earnings to the government.

We are "obligated" to support others who can not, or will not, find employment of their own.

We are "obligated" to pay for the health care of others.

We are "obligated" to pay for "free" government-run education programs.

We are "obligated" to pay for services, subsidies, and stadiums for profitable businesses, and for not-for-profit organizations of dubious purposes.

Adding insult to injury, we are "obligated" to pay for the salaries, staffs, and perks of those individuals who impose these costs upon us in spite of our individual wishes in the matter.

It is true that you are automatically responsible for your actions. However, you rightfully have no obligations at all, until you have knowingly and willingly agreed to them.

This is not to suggest that one should avoid all obligations. It is to point out that it is wrong to make it appear that an individual has an obligation without their having specifically agreed to it!

If a cost of an action must be passed along to someone else, then it follows that the one who makes good on the costs must do so willingly and by agreement.

If there is no agreement, then the person who is burdened with the costs has suffered an act of aggression and theft just as if he or she had been held up and robbed at gunpoint.

Freedom has as one of its foundational principles the idea of responsibility. Responsibility is impartial, an attribute of the individual.

An individual is always responsible for what he or she does, whether they wish to be or not, and even when they are ignorant of the ethical implications that might arise from their actions.

The erosion of the uniquely American ideas of freedom is closely tied to the cultural erosion of personal responsibility.

Responsibility for self, one of the greatest moral attributes to which men and women can aspire, is being steadily displaced by the socialist myth of universal obligation.

As individual members of society, we must stop blaming the gun manufacturers, the cigarette makers, the movie producers, the health care providers, et cetera , for the decisions and actions of ourselves and others.

Ultimately, responsibility and freedom are two sides of the same coin; the loss of one will ultimately result in the loss of the other. Responsibility is not the price of freedom, but its reward.

Any movement whose main promise is the relief from responsibility cannot help but erode freedom, no matter how lofty its ideals or aims.

Responsibility and freedom. They are yours. Use them well.