Questions We Need to Ask Ourselves...

Several friends have been asking me why I haven't posted anything lately here. Since I last posted in early June, I've just been quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) watching the government insanity increase with one crazy bill after another being passed and considered. It boggles the imagination.

I was shocked and dismayed to see the 'Cap & Trade' bill pass the House, even after the eighth coldest June since we've been recording temperatures. I stood at a Tea Party on July 3rd wearing pants and long sleeves and a jacket (in JULY!) shivering and pondering the irony of passing a bill that will cause home and business electricity costs to "necessarily skyrocket" (Obama's words during the campaign) in the hopes of making even the teeniest tiniest impact in decreasing the temperature by a fraction of a percent. Never mind that two of the largest growing economies in the world (China and India) have made it perfectly clear that they will never agree to cap emissions because they know it will cause irreparable harm to their economy. We stupid and arrogant Americans apparently want to be poorer and pay dearly for energy in hopes of making it..., well..., even colder than it already is. If it gets any colder, I'm going to have to move to Florida well before retirement. Fortunately, the cap and trade bill isn't actually about global warming at all and will have virtually zero impact in cooling the already cooling temperatures, because the only real accomplishment will be to set up yet another complicated governmental beaurocratic system rife with opportunities for the corrupt to capitalize on.

Government-run health care is even more frightening than the cap and trade nonsense. Cap & Trade will make us poorer, but nationalized health care may possibly kill us. I've yet to hear a satisfactory answer when I ask people who think nationalized health care is a good idea what the government has ever run efficiently and effectively that gives them a reason to hope that government health care would be a good thing. That's because, other than the military where they consistently over-spend, there *isn't* anything the government runs well or efficiently. They can't even keep track of who is alive and who is dead in this country, as social security and stimulus money consistently gets sent to people who have been dead for decades! Their primary goal in nationalizing health care is to "cut costs", and I can't help but wonder why people can't put two and two together and see that what that means is "less care that you wait longer to get (if you get it at all)". There is some truth to the old adage "you get what you pay for", and if Americans want a free ride on the government health care express, they'll find out all too soon what that really means for them. I only hope that we don't have to dismantle the best health care system in the world to reach the obvious and logical conclusion. I do not want government beaurocrats making my health care decisions for me. Not now, not ever; no thanks.

And several months after the stimulus bill passed and clearly failed to do anything that they claimed it would do, they are getting ready to do yet another one. Democrat and Obama supporter Camille Paglia called the first stimuls bill "that chaotic pig rut of a stimulus package, which let House Democrats throw a thousand crazy kitchen sinks into what should have been a focused blueprint for economic recovery" (Source) and she was right. Now it looks like we're going to do it again, and I can't find *anybody* of any political party who thinks this is actually a good idea. Its sickening to most Americans that we've increased the tax burden on our children as far into the future as the eye can see -- and if that's not taxation without representation, I don't know what is.

We shouldn't let them do this. We should camp out in Washington D.C. and tell them that we are not leaving until they stop this insanity, but we can't because we have jobs and we have lives and we have families to take care of. Its not that people don't care, it's that people are busy and they think that someone else will take care of it or that it will work out in the end anyway because this is America after all. But America has hit hard times, and what our future will be is what we make it, or what we allow to be made of it.

As we consider all this, I think there are several important questions we "thinking" people need to be asking ourselves and others:

1) Am I so wedded to a particular party or set of ideas that I'm unwilling to see other points of view or to entertain rational thought or debate about the policies that spring from that party or ideology? Is there some person or some set of people that I'm trusting implicitly without considering what their motivations may be?

2) Are we really willing to give up the freedom of "private choice" (individual/family chooses for themselves) in favor of "public choice" (government chooses for all of us; one size fits all) because we hope it will cost us and/or others less money?

3) Do we think its wise for government to make all the choices about spending in financial industries, the auto industry, energy, health care, etc. when research always and consistently shows that money is spent most efficiently and wisely when people are spending their *own* money than when spending *other people's* money? The government is always spending other people's money, and they do a terrible job of it!

4) Is the government able to run a business better than the private sector? For that matter, are government officials any more trustworthy than businessmen, that we should give them unprecented power over our lives? We can choose which store to shop at when there are several competing stores, but when there is only *one* store to shop at, freedom and choice are gone and the consumer loses.

5) Do we think its wise to borrow, print money, and spend at the levels the government is on the things the government is spending on? Would we choose those same practices in our own household budgets and effectively bankrupt our own children to spend money "today" or would we choose fiscal discipline?

6) Are we willing to enslave our children and grandchildren with an enduring tax burden that we can't even begin to imagine for the current unsustainable spending that will have no real or measurable benefit to them?

There are lots more questions than these actually, but this set of questions is a good start.