Dear Government, Thanks, but No Thanks

When future generations look back at what became of the United States of America, they might be most amazed at how the government, in spite of its record of abject failure, continued to expand its influence into even the most mundane tasks. Recently the president had his attention distracted from making plans to manage medical practices throughout America by an unruly airplane passenger. All of this while he was surfing in Hawaii.

Consider that for more than two centuries Americans did simple things like went to the doctor, bought medicine, fixed meals, traveled from town to town and later across the country and then throughout the world with budgetary limitations as the only inconveniences to trouble them. Now it seems that only the highest reaches of government can assure that the nation can complete the routines of life safely and securely. Interestingly, though, the more the government gets involved with helping its subjects, the more hazardous American life becomes.

The decade just completed, according to Pat Buchanan, witnessed America’s share of the world’s gross domestic product decline from 32 percent to 24 percent. “No nation in modern history,” wrote Buchanan, “save for the late Soviet Union, has seen so precipitous a decline in relative power in a single decade.”

He reported that the government opened the new millennium with a budget surplus but it closed the recently past decade with an annual deficit that is 10 percent of gross domestic product and will repeat that level again during 2010. In 2000 the economy was at full employment whereas currently up to 17 percent of the labor force is either unemployed, underemployed, or given up even looking for work.

Buchanan continues, “Between one-fourth and one-third of all U.S. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared,…the median income of American families was stagnant, (while) the national debt doubled,…the dollar lost half its value against the euro,…the U.S.A. Is almost as dependent on foreign nations today for manufactured goods, and the loans to pay for them, as we were in the early years of the republic.”

These facts would suggest that people in American government and the private industries that helped to build American to power have made decisions that are guiding the nation to ruin. People of conscience would look at these consequences and feel remorse, however, it seems the giants of industry are mostly preoccupied with devising strategies to keep the majority of Americans in support of their self-serving plots.

No less than the seventh son of Hizoner, the late mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley I, William M. Daley, recently opined in the Washington Post that, despite polls that show that Democrat candidates are going to suffer severe losses to Republicans during the 2010 election, “All that is required for the Democratic Party to recover its political footing is to acknowledge that the agenda of the party’s most liberal supporters has not won the support of a majority of Americans — and, … to steer a more moderate course on the key issues of the day, …. For liberals to accept that inescapable reality is not to concede permanent defeat. Rather, let them take it as a sign that they must continue the hard work of slowly and steadily persuading their fellow citizens to embrace their perspective. In the meantime, liberals … should have the … long-term perspective to know that intraparty warfare will only relegate the Democrats to minority status, which would be disastrous for the very constituents they seek to represent.” In other words, Daley suggests that Democrats take the tactic of, “One step forward, two steps back.”

Daley sees the problems America is facing not as consequences of mismanagement by a bipartisan political system, but as results from the wrong part of that political system exerting control over policy. Daley himself wrote, “If anything, the Democrats’ salvation may lie in the fact that Republicans seem even more hell-bent on allowing their radical wing to drag the party away from the center. “

The status that Daley holds in the Democrat Party as well as the lofty position his opinion received with the Washington Post suggest that his views are endemic through the entire political system—especially if taken in context of the daily rants of “Conservative” talkers that permeate radio and Fox News programming. Essentially operatives of the Democrats and Republicans consider the plight of America to be little more than a P.R. challenge to cajole a majority of voters to give either Republicans or Democrats majority in government.

Power is the ultimate objective of America’s political system and the people directing America’s government. Where people are seeking to gain power, liberty and justice for all will be smothered. Consider the influence that government power to protect its subjects has had on the freedom of people to travel, care for themselves, and use their property and talents to provide for their needs. The evidence of such a study suggests that freedom in the United States is a dying concept.

Peter Schiff, a libertarian author and advocate of Austrian economics, recently sounded a call to anyone with ears to hear and eyes to read: “My sincere hope for the coming decade is that I can help our leaders see what Time (magazine with its choice of Ben Bernanke as “Man of the Year”) cannot: we need to stop committing the economic sins that are leading us to hell,…We need everyone to stop spending more than they earn. That is true not just for individuals, but for our government as well….However, if we can confess our sins, and vow to reform our ways, perhaps this will merely be a decade in purgatory. Perhaps we can turn it into the decade of hope, hard work, individual liberty, savings, production, investment, sound money, de-regulation, exports, budget surpluses, capitalism, limited government, and respect for the Constitution. These traits will harden us to withstand the fallout from our reckless past.”

Schiff has put before us the challenge to preserve any vestige of our freedom. We can depend on a government with a record of destruction and incompetence to care for us or we can look at how we have come to this place and begin to work, as free men, to care for ourselves and our families.

Clearly our future is more secure if we can get it back into our own hands.

By: Bob Strodtbeck

Bob Strodtbeck has been writing editorial commentaries since 1993. He has professional experiences in pharmaceuticals, radio, and education. He has also served as a church elder in an Orlando congregation where he has made his home since 1986.