Danger! Danger!

"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." -- Albert Einstein

It’s a sad day for America when our citizens, long known for their individualism and love of freedom, have accepted a childlike faith in the powers of big government. Our new federal administration is quickly taking this idea to astronomic new levels as it proposes a seemingly unending series of centralized government plans to regulate, control, and now subsidize, every facet of our lives. And it's not just the far left who are so happy with the thought of individuals bowing to government wishes, with many self proclaimed Republicans now believing that government can protect us from all evil, make us moral and upright, and in whatever spare time is left we can impose democratic governments on other nations. Today’s entire political scene… from the far right to the far left… has become nothing more than an insane grab for power with the vast majority of Americans stuck, seemingly powerless, in the middle.

The Left hates the private sector even as its believers enjoy the fruits of our “despicable” market-based system. Leftist leaning government workers profit by regulating, controlling, and bossing around everyone else, yet somehow it's OK for them to live off the fruit of the land. You've got to wonder about people who are so obsessed with divvying up Americas apple pie, and yet want to regulate and completely control the people who grew the apples, milled the flour, built the oven, and even baked the pie! Certainly people have the right to profit from their efforts, but the left would strip the productive of their gain in order to “redistribute the wealth” to those who are not productive, all in the guise of numerous “reel good” social welfare programs. It was once claimed that no government could afford to ignore the social needs of its people if it intended to stay in power. Quite so I think, but neither can any government afford to address every social need of every citizen unless it wants to soon become bankrupt. In our case that’s shortly after we go broke funding the needs of big business!

Yes, there are things government legitimately is tasked to do. People who criminally violate other people's rights need to be stopped. We need government to protect our nation from foreign invaders. Given the fallible nature of government (and of human beings), our founders created a system filled with checks and balances and limitations on government power. Americans started out grudgingly letting government protect life, liberty and property, and now we’re cheering a government that is obliterating all those things! George Washington once said, "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master." Advocates of bigger government, even in the guise of social programs, are doing nothing less than calling for the creation of more masters and more servants, with most of us destined to fall into that latter class.

Several years ago a friend asked me why I was so “down” on college educated people. I don’t remember what my answer was, but his question has stuck in my mind ever since, and I’ve never figured out just how to properly answer it. In truth, I have nothing against education… in fact I’m a firm believer in the educational process, and I’d think that without a very long line of educated people behind us we’d still be living in the stone age! What I do object to is the huge number of people who are “educated” far beyond their level of competence, and consider themselves the greatest living experts in their chosen field. Many of them seem to believe that they have all the answers to the problems of mankind, and manage to get themselves hired by the government in order to regulate our lives in accordance with their half-baked theories!

Is it really a surprise that America was for so long a bastion of wealth, ingenuity and freedom? Was it because we had more public-spirited and intelligent government officials, or was it because our government was designed with strict limits so that the private sector could flourish? I don't really like Soviet and Nazi analogies, but there's a reason those systems were so brutal and evil. They were systems that gave full control of daily life to the government. The beauty of our nation's founding is that it drew strict lines around governmental authority. Over many years, those lines have grown dim, and now we allowing them to be erased completely. An editorial in Russia's Pravda newspaper recently chastised America for heading down its current path: "Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western-sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our 'wise' Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride. … The proud American will go down into his slavery without a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world how free he really is. The world will only snicker." Yet even as America heads down that socialist trail, we still lecture the world about our freedom.

I for one am greatly concerned about the sheer number of issues Barack Obama is cramming down the throats of Congress and the American people. Everyday we see more items on his "I want” list, while he doesn’t bother to ask the American people what they want, and refuses to tolerate any opposition to his position on any subject. What did we do, somehow manage to elect a king? Despite evidence to the contrary from countries and even our states (California) who have tried his policies, he doesn’t change his efforts to destroy the United States from within, and turn us into a socialist regime. The national debt he has piled-up will take centuries to pay off, the energy bill will cost us millions of jobs and make any sort of energy unaffordable. His "health care" plan will turn into another nightmare of government inefficiency. Congress is never given time to read (if they even can read) proposed bills, or even to know what is in them, yet they’re expected to happily turn out "yes" votes on command of the omnipotent one. What has happened to our Constitution, and our common sense?

The American people watched the fall of the once mighty Soviet Union, as their version of socialism failed and their government collapsed under its own weight. Daily we watch Red China struggle with their efforts to remain a socialist state and yet allow the private enterprise they can’t survive without. We see the failings of European style socialism displayed on television and in the newspapers nearly every day. We can see starvation marching across socialist North Korea. Yet our left leaning administration is grabbing all the reins of power they can get, and seems hell-bent on forcing the United States to follow in the footsteps of those failed socialist states!

Under no president except Abe Lincoln have the American people ever wanted to leave the union, yet today we have a growing secessionist movement all across the country, primarily I think because so many Americans are well aware that no government in history has ever voluntarily surrendered its power over the common citizen. And unfortunately today’s average American seems far more interested in the doings of movie stars and sports icons than in what our elected politicians are doing to us.