What is the American Dream? When asked this question most people today are programmed to say “To own your own home.” That may be Freddie and Fannie’s dream. That may be the bubble inflating vote buying politician’s choice for our dream, but that isn’t the American Dream. Owning your own home isn’t the dream people sailed in tiny leaking over-crowded wooden ships across oceans to find. Owning your own home isn’t the dream people fought the Revolution to win and other wars to preserve. We the descendants of the pioneers have been sold a bill of goods. We have embraced a culture of hedonism and self-indulgence financed with a borrowed credit card.
The American Dream is and always has been freedom and opportunity.
This is the Holy Grail for which people have been willing to sacrifice. This is the singularity which made America great. This is the difference which allowed a people who were no people to become a people. Ordinary people from everywhere, members of every race, religion, ethnicity, and culture assimilated and forged into one extraordinary nationality: the American. Freedom and opportunity unleashed the ingenuity and energy of humanity. Rising above the squalid shabbiness of the statists enforced conformity as the citizen began to control and at last benefit from the fruits of their own labor.
By forsaking the dream of our forefathers we have embraced the nightmare of their oppressors forging again the very chains our revolutionary ancestors shattered. From the beginning of time statists of one variety or another have kept their iron heel upon the throat of the general population. Whether they called themselves; chiefs, or kings, emperors or gods those who believe they have a right to command the service of others have always survived as parasites leaching the produce of whomever they were strong enough to compel. Calling them tithes, contributions, donations, or taxes it has always been the same thing, “What’s mine is mine. What’s yours is negotiable.”
Following the chiefdoms of the Neolithic villages Priest-kings combined shamanism and dynastic power to create a world wherein the possessions of all became the possessions of the ruler. In Western Civilization there was a brief anomaly when the people of Greece experimented with a new concept, democracy, power to the people. And although this was always a proscribed definition of who constituted “the people.” None-the-less inventiveness, culture and scientific inquiry exploded into a Golden Age. Soon however, wars and corruption brought the brief respite of freedom crashing into the military dictatorship of the Roman Imperium and the statists once again asserted their right to divine privilege and power.
The corruption, taxes, and inflation which always define a statist government brought about the fall of Rome. Replaced in the East by a successor empire so strangled by bureaucracy and state control its very name, “Byzantine” has come to mean the triumph of red tape over individual freedom. In the West the edifice of Caesar devolved into petty kingdoms and barbarian chiefdoms where life was short, brutish, and enslaved. The common laborer became little more than chattel tied to the land and exchanged between their betters as a mere piece of property. These kleptocracies were eventually consolidated into nation-states by whoever clawed their way to the top of the food chain as the strongest or most ruthless oppressor of all. After a few generations they discovered the theory of divine-right, and by using damnation in the after-life as a whip they did their best to turn this life into a living hell.
An eruption of exploration, colonization, and conquest vaulted Western Civilization to the top of the heap translating a recent and fleeting preeminence in technology and organization into a centuries long reign as the political and cultural hegemonic power of the world. The representatives of the divine rights of European Kings penetrated into every corner of the world where they set-up forts and bought the place for beads. Even the few who escaped actual conquest such as Ethiopia and Japan had homegrown statists asserting their right to deny rights to others. By the end of the seventeenth century the regimented sameness which flows from a lack of individual freedom gripped every portion of what was called the civilized world.
Into this world the American Revolution blazed like a comet illuminating the realms of possibility by the light of a national experiment declaring, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” After fighting and winning a long war against impossible odds the United States, the land of the free and the home of the brave, unfurled its banner proclaiming for the first time in human history that here is a place where divine rights do not belong to kings they belong to all.
For over 100 years the Progressives have sought to supplant our Revolution with their evolution. These radical Evolutionaries have methodically moved America one entitlement at a time from self-reliance and personal responsibility towards the cradle-to-grave conformity which is the hallmark of modern statists. As we face the coming debates, as we prepare for the electoral and legislative battles let us remember that the American dream has always been freedom and opportunity as we reject the materialistic bribes of the Progressive nanny-state. Reject the smothering comforter promised through government programs which will enslave our children and grandchildren and drink once again the heady wine of freedom.
Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion for Southside Virginia Community College and History for the American Public University System. http://drrobertowens.com © 2010 Robert R. Owens dr.owens@comcast.net
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Sunday, September 5, 2010
It's Easy Being Critical
With the Not Ready for Prime Time Players holding court in the White House and the Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight in Control of Congress it is easy to be critical. However, as our beloved Republic drinks the dregs of the Grapes of Wrath in this, the Season of our Discontent, being critical is not enough. Those of us who believe in limited government, free enterprise and personal liberty need to offer an alternate vision of the future or the Progressive who are seeking to prove that the only problem with all former attempts at a regimented collectivist corporate state was that they weren’t the ones implementing the 5 year plan will win by default.
First we must honestly assess our situation.
The American economy was been derailed by a combination of over regulation, over taxation and crony capitalism’s casino mentality. Since the congressionally mandated housing bubble collapsed dragging the phantom investments of the cronies to the casino floor the bureaucrats who mandated the mess have been in charge of cleaning it up. As a result a cyclical recession which according to the precedent of history should have been over in 14 months (May, 09) has been successfully stretched out for 29 months and counting.
In foreign affairs there is military side and the diplomatic. Militarily, our pre-emptive war in Iraq continues no matter what they call it. Afghanistan is swirling down the drain after the Commander-in-Chief decided it was a good strategy to announce his planned withdrawal date while showcasing the implementation of a surge. Our all volunteer military has performed valiantly and brilliantly however, no matter how sharp or strong the point of a spear is it is only as effective as the person wielding the weapon. Diplomatically, our President bows to foreign leaders, insults our friends and is seen as weak and ineffective by our enemies. Even the European socialists who provide the models for his vision of America and who added their voices to his choir back when he was the Progressive messiah have lately lost their enthusiasm for a leader of the free world who is leading them from the first world to the second.
Culturally, the peace, love and egotism of the boomers continue to plunge America into a cesspool of licentiousness and vanity. The culture of death has progressed from abortion to euthanasia. The celebrity worship has progressed from the adulation of actors and artists to the cult of reality TV where people are now famous for being famous. Our education system, once the envy of the world; produces high school graduates who can’t read their own diplomas, our institutions of higher learning are the bastions of anti-Americanism and Marxist thought, and teachers unions demand more for delivering less.
In an essay-sized capsule these are three major areas that need to be addressed. We know from experience the Progressive’s knee-jerk answer, bigger government, more taxes, more regulations and a continued surrender of America’s position as the world’s sole super-power. What are the alternatives? Or to answer the question the best wife in the world keeps asking, “What can we do?”
Economically: If the TARP funds had been used to buy up the toxic assets as we were told they would be when the Bush Progressives rammed that boondoggle through the toxic assets would now be a memory instead of the sword hanging over our heads. A national income tax holiday for sixty days would have cost less than the failed stimulus that is in reality a slush fund for the Progressive’s major contributors. Let people keep the money they earn in their pockets and they will spend us out of this recession. Allowing us to drill for oil on land in our own country where we have massive untapped reserves and where the technology makes it the safest instead of fifty miles out and a mile down would have eased if not ended our dependence on others and kept hundreds of billions of dollars at home. Equal trade instead of a mythical free trade would keep us competitive in our own market, keep jobs at home and preserved if not expanded our industrial base. An announcement right now that the government was going extend the Bush tax cuts, not impose any more anti-free enterprise regulations or seize any more corporations would promote growth and provide jobs immediately.
Diplomatically; stop insulting our friends and embracing our enemies, stop branding our own States as human rights abusers for trying to protect themselves from an invasion the Federal Government is not only allowing but through their own inaction and policies encouraging. In short, stop bowing and stand up for America! Militarily; you can never end a pre-emptive war too soon. In Afghanistan, we should have gone in, cleaned out the Al Qaeda rat’s nest and squashed the feudal state of the Taliban then left with the promise, “Do it again and we’ll do it again.” Instead we have stayed for one more example that nation-building in a nation that isn’t a nation doesn’t work. Declare victory and come home. Put the troops on the borders and make the homeland secure.
Culturally; this must all start at home. Families need to promote a culture of life instead of a culture of death, honor those to whom honor is due and begin to be the examples our young people deserve. Clean the schools out. End tenure. Provide school vouchers that actually move the funding to the schools people want to support. Offer vocational training to all the students who make it obvious they aren’t interested in intellectual pursuits. Teach American History that is inclusive and yet respectful of humanity’s greatest experiment in freedom and opportunity. Teach political science in such a way that students will gain an understanding of what limited government and personal liberty.
When you are bleeding to death the first thing you must do is stop the bleeding. When you are trapped in a hole the first thing you must do is stop digging. There are answers that encourage freedom and enhance liberty. There are answers that preserve our position and protect or independence. There are solutions to the problems which seem to be overwhelming us: let the free choices of the American people lead us back to economic prosperity, Jettison the Empire to save the Republic, and teach the truth.
Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion for Southside Virginia Community College and History for the American Public University System. http://drrobertowens.com © 2010 Robert R. Owens dr.owens@comcast.net
First we must honestly assess our situation.
The American economy was been derailed by a combination of over regulation, over taxation and crony capitalism’s casino mentality. Since the congressionally mandated housing bubble collapsed dragging the phantom investments of the cronies to the casino floor the bureaucrats who mandated the mess have been in charge of cleaning it up. As a result a cyclical recession which according to the precedent of history should have been over in 14 months (May, 09) has been successfully stretched out for 29 months and counting.
In foreign affairs there is military side and the diplomatic. Militarily, our pre-emptive war in Iraq continues no matter what they call it. Afghanistan is swirling down the drain after the Commander-in-Chief decided it was a good strategy to announce his planned withdrawal date while showcasing the implementation of a surge. Our all volunteer military has performed valiantly and brilliantly however, no matter how sharp or strong the point of a spear is it is only as effective as the person wielding the weapon. Diplomatically, our President bows to foreign leaders, insults our friends and is seen as weak and ineffective by our enemies. Even the European socialists who provide the models for his vision of America and who added their voices to his choir back when he was the Progressive messiah have lately lost their enthusiasm for a leader of the free world who is leading them from the first world to the second.
Culturally, the peace, love and egotism of the boomers continue to plunge America into a cesspool of licentiousness and vanity. The culture of death has progressed from abortion to euthanasia. The celebrity worship has progressed from the adulation of actors and artists to the cult of reality TV where people are now famous for being famous. Our education system, once the envy of the world; produces high school graduates who can’t read their own diplomas, our institutions of higher learning are the bastions of anti-Americanism and Marxist thought, and teachers unions demand more for delivering less.
In an essay-sized capsule these are three major areas that need to be addressed. We know from experience the Progressive’s knee-jerk answer, bigger government, more taxes, more regulations and a continued surrender of America’s position as the world’s sole super-power. What are the alternatives? Or to answer the question the best wife in the world keeps asking, “What can we do?”
Economically: If the TARP funds had been used to buy up the toxic assets as we were told they would be when the Bush Progressives rammed that boondoggle through the toxic assets would now be a memory instead of the sword hanging over our heads. A national income tax holiday for sixty days would have cost less than the failed stimulus that is in reality a slush fund for the Progressive’s major contributors. Let people keep the money they earn in their pockets and they will spend us out of this recession. Allowing us to drill for oil on land in our own country where we have massive untapped reserves and where the technology makes it the safest instead of fifty miles out and a mile down would have eased if not ended our dependence on others and kept hundreds of billions of dollars at home. Equal trade instead of a mythical free trade would keep us competitive in our own market, keep jobs at home and preserved if not expanded our industrial base. An announcement right now that the government was going extend the Bush tax cuts, not impose any more anti-free enterprise regulations or seize any more corporations would promote growth and provide jobs immediately.
Diplomatically; stop insulting our friends and embracing our enemies, stop branding our own States as human rights abusers for trying to protect themselves from an invasion the Federal Government is not only allowing but through their own inaction and policies encouraging. In short, stop bowing and stand up for America! Militarily; you can never end a pre-emptive war too soon. In Afghanistan, we should have gone in, cleaned out the Al Qaeda rat’s nest and squashed the feudal state of the Taliban then left with the promise, “Do it again and we’ll do it again.” Instead we have stayed for one more example that nation-building in a nation that isn’t a nation doesn’t work. Declare victory and come home. Put the troops on the borders and make the homeland secure.
Culturally; this must all start at home. Families need to promote a culture of life instead of a culture of death, honor those to whom honor is due and begin to be the examples our young people deserve. Clean the schools out. End tenure. Provide school vouchers that actually move the funding to the schools people want to support. Offer vocational training to all the students who make it obvious they aren’t interested in intellectual pursuits. Teach American History that is inclusive and yet respectful of humanity’s greatest experiment in freedom and opportunity. Teach political science in such a way that students will gain an understanding of what limited government and personal liberty.
When you are bleeding to death the first thing you must do is stop the bleeding. When you are trapped in a hole the first thing you must do is stop digging. There are answers that encourage freedom and enhance liberty. There are answers that preserve our position and protect or independence. There are solutions to the problems which seem to be overwhelming us: let the free choices of the American people lead us back to economic prosperity, Jettison the Empire to save the Republic, and teach the truth.
Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion for Southside Virginia Community College and History for the American Public University System. http://drrobertowens.com © 2010 Robert R. Owens dr.owens@comcast.net
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