Beware Of The Big-Government Tipping Point

by Peter Wehner and Paul Ryan - January 16th, 2009 - The Wall Street Journal (Opinion Journal)

For most of our nation's history, our approach to economics has favored enterprise, self-reliance and the free market. While the American economy has never been entirely laissez-faire, we have historically cared more about equality of opportunity than equality of results. And while Americans have embraced elements of the New Deal, the Great Society and progressive taxation, we have traditionally viewed welfare as a way to help those in dire need, not as a way of life for the middle class. We have grasped, perhaps more than any other nation, that there is a long-run cost to dependency on the state, including an aversion to risk that eventually enervates the entrepreneurial spirit necessary for innovation and prosperity.

This outlook, once assumed, is now under attack ...

This is an interesting article, and I thought when I first started reading it that I had found someone else who saw the towering problems of our nation as I did. Then the writers started to argue for how, through "efficient" government, they could design an alteration of the medical "industry" that would provide low cost health care, without fixing the corrupt court system that is the ultimate core issue. No tough choices are needed to be made. People don't need to stand up and take responsibility for their own problems. We just need to be more efficient in how we take freedom away from people. Sheesh.

It turns out that even though they see the reality of how close we are to a socialist tyranny, they are no more concerned with freedom than so many of the other brilliant MBA types who think you can have individual freedom and government control at the same time. You just have to give THEM control to force their brilliant solutions on the rest of the country. In truth, they are no different than Karl Rove and George W. Bush. They are too impressed with themselves.

One real problem no one ever wants to concede is that too few people among our youth of today have any clue about history. They have not read and certainly do not understand the two most important books written about politics and the history of socialism; Frederich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" and Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged".

America today is at war. We are under attack from Islamo-fascism, Aztlantism and Global Socialism. Many of the leaders of this last war, global socialism, are U.S. Citizens, hypothetically Americans, yet they reject free markets as a key to American success. They think that implementing socialism will allow us to share our great wealth more "fairly", whatever that means. They do not believe, and cannot be convinced, that free markets are the REASON for our wealth. They do not believe, and cannot be convinced, that ending free markets will end our wealth advantage over the rest of the world.

Unless and until conservatives wake up and agree that this is war and we are willing to fight it like war, the war is already lost.