January 18, 2008
by Clay Barham
If you ask that question of virtually any government bureaucrat or elected politician, they will answer emphatically NO. Everything they have been doing since FDR has been to protect us from our own stupidity. Isn't that wonderful? The elites in government and the media know Americans are stupid.
Furthermore, they know best how to control our stupidity with propaganda, regulations and taxes. Those are their levers. With them, they keep us on an even keel, yet bankrupt us as a nation.
What if government disappeared? What if the federal and state capitals were hit with a ray that made them, and the people in them, vanish? All that was left would be county governments, law enforcement and lesser courts using the short version statute books. How would we survive? Would we all melt in panic, as the Wicked Witch hit with the water thrown by Dorothy?
Or, would we revert to being Americans again, each of us standing on our own two feet and meeting life as problem-solvers? Would we revert to a free market economy, trading what we have and can do for what we need, as we did in our earliest days? Is the American tradition of individual freedom, care for family and community, alive again, or would we all become murdering savages?
Reflecting back on our earliest history, free Americans had no choice but to prosper on their own, for the sake of themselves and their families. The communities in which they lived prospered as well, because of their efforts. Americans reached out to create, invent, build and manufacture things they needed and could trade with what others made. Their efforts created the wealthiest nation in the world.
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Americans were free of restrictive; I know better government, which did not get in the way of their growth or happiness. In becoming happy and prosperous, people became different from each other, unequal in their tastes and appetites, even though opportunity, elbowroom and success were equally available to all. However, some political aspirants saw in that inequality an opportunity to enrich themselves by driving wedges between Americans based on their differences.
Their politics of envy generated anger in many. The more anger they created, the better their chance for gaining control of all Americans. The politicians of equal outcome banded together. A new FDR rose to the top, telling Americans what they liked to hear, and once in office, began anew the forces of control and management of the populace.
They collected all the envious, angry, depressed people who felt no one should have more than they should, and they took America back. That put us on the new road to collapse looking for another ray from the sky to set things right again.
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Clay Barham [send him email] has been a candidate for the California legislature and a stand-in talk show host for ABC. He was educated in physical and behavioral sciences, with a Ph.D. in sociology. He is the author of five books, with his latest being Foundations of Modern American Conservatism and Liberalism: The Roots of Freedom and Tyranny. Visit his website at http://www.claysamerica.com.
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