The country that once elected leaders whose ideas upheld liberty now elects leaders whose sweet-sounding platitudes and woozy promises are all that is required, and whose actual, dangerous ideas need not be examined until after Election Day.
The country that defended property rights now seizes 40-percent of our income in a myriad of taxes imposed by all levels of government — with even larger levies on incomes, profits, investments, and savings on the horizon.
The country that championed capitalism now vilifies our industries, cripples them with regulations, seizes their profits, then declares that the free market has failed and government must take over.
The country that made possible the great industrial titans—the Henry Fords, Thomas Edisons, and others whose productive genius moved mankind forward—now thinks that government can run things better, and that government should own, operate, and finance our corporations, deciding which will survive and which will die, creating a new kind of soup kitchen where emaciated companies stand in a bread-line waiting for their bailout.
The country that protected the individual now protects polar bears, spotted owls, caribou, and the wilderness at the expense of human life.
The country that fought a revolution to end the abuse of power now elects politicians who wallow in power like hippos in mud, such as members of congressional subcommittees who hold hearings threatening the prosperity or very existence of American business firms, and then let the hearings end with little or no result when the hapless firms make sufficient contributions to the reelection campaigns of the congressmen.(*)
It is the mighty that have the farthest to fall. Most often, that fall is not precipitated by one great clash with the enemy but, as Mark Steyn explains, "by a thousand trivial concessions, until one day you wake up and you don't need to sign a formal instrument of surrender because you did it piecemeal."
Is it too late to slam on the emergency brakes? Observe the altruist-collectivist rhetoric of high-ranking members of the Obama administration. Or witness the moral depth of the government's representatives. Or study the soundness of the state's economic policies.
Americans are up to their necks in the quicksand of statism and the more they struggle - the more they cram their destructive 'stimulus' packages through congress and the closer they crawl to universal health care - the harder they will find it to claw back out of the mire.
Steyn's thousand trivial concessions are upon us. Tomorrow Canadians may wake up next to the world's biggest welfare state, trillions of dollars in debt and begging for the self-esteem it once deserved.
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