Is It All Coming To An End?

The law has always been of interest to me, particularly it’s eb and flow as it affects your liberty and mine. The wisdom of our highly educated forefathers and the construction of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution has been proven innumerable times over the 240 or so years since that time that so blessed all of us who came after.

As we watch our current administration we wonder if the old adage ‘all good things must end’ is coming to fruition?

At the end of the nineteenth century, with it’s incredible changes in the country with the gold rush—the largest migration in the history of the world—and Manifest Destiny as President Tyler added Texas to the fold and took the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific with the Mexican War (suggest you read?A COUNTRY OF VAST DESIGNS?by Robert W. Merry) and with the Civil War, which basically molded the country and perfected the ideas of individual freedom, the country matured and became the envy of the world. It took lots of time, lots of sacrifice, lots of lives given in its pursuit, and lots of wise men in Congress and the Supreme Court, and yes in the farms and fields and mountains and on the sea. Common men, who insisted upon maintaining and perfecting the liberties that our founding documents promised, men and later women who elected those who promised to respect the promise.

This country grew with the concept of laissez-faire, the concept of economic theory that prosperity was achieved when individuals were left free to pursue their own self-interest. To those who followed and promoted the concept—gleaned from the Constitution—it was a matter of natural law and rights. God given. Every American could improve themselves and their comfort, the promise of liberty, so long as it didn’t interfere with the rights of others. Francis Wayland, an economist of the time, said it very well, “government’s efforts to solve economic problems, no matter how sincere, had the opposite effect. They upset the economic balance, destroyed incentive for labor, and sapped the spirit of enterprise and productive energies of the nation.”?

At no time in my eight decades of enjoying the liberty and fruits of my own efforts have I seen a better example of this warning than this last two years and this administration’s, and Supreme Court’s, disdain for all that made this country the go-to and envy of the world. All we have to do is go to our local supermarket and find empty shelves to prove the futility of government interference in a free economy, and to note help-wanted signs in nearly every business window at the same time the government warns of high unemployment. What could be more obvious. As Ronald Reagan so aptly said, the most feared words in the English language: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.

Government, get the hell out of the way. Folks, I quote my most poignant line from the song I wrote,?BEEN SOME STAYED SOME, and caution you, it’s never been more important: Hard work makes a man, hand out palm up forsakes a man. And it applies to the country if we want it to regain its footing, to return to the track designed for it and us by our forefathers, and protected for us by so many who gave their lives to preserve the promise.