Get it Right: Whining to the Feds

America is racing toward bankruptcy, with debts beyond any ability to repay. The debt clock stands near 17 trillion, with future combined federal liabilities (social security, prescriptions drugs, Medicare, ect.) at 126 trillion, an incomprehensible sum. Yet we still beg for federal funds. Why? The government has no money. To feed its gluttony, it borrows every cent it gives and vastly more. Why do we add to it, boarding a rapidly sinking ship, only to sink it further?

Conservatives routinely bewail the entitlement mentality. Lest we forget, cities, counties and states can embrace entitlement as well. Under our Constitution, the federal government has only 26 responsibilities: twenty for Congress and six to the president. Funding non-federal projects, such as Alpine's $750,000 flood mitigation project, is not among the 26 duties, yet that request graces the desk of federal bureaucrats.
It's not that the project is not necessary or good; it's just not a federal matter, and making it so embraces entitlement. If the project is necessary, it should be locally funded with citizen support, strong priorities, and a paring knife aimed at current expenditures.
America, under our original Constitution, became great through independence. As a basic system, anything non-essential fell to private enterprise. Anything essential for the community was funded there; ditto for the county, double ditto for the state. Each state was an independent laboratory; a sovereign body with the duty to care for its own. Beyond what all states needed, such as a national navy, unified postal system, uniform bankruptcy laws and patents, a universal monetary system, the states were the boss. There was no whining to the feds.
Things have changed! Now we "run home to papa" -- the federal government. But papa is broke; he has no money. His life savings are gone, he's in hock to the bank for a whole lot more than he owns and the banks have threatened to shut him down. Yet we still run to papa for funds. As an example, students go to him for loans -- almost half, 45 percent, of Utah graduates owe the Feds over $17,000 at graduation, with $1 trillion owed nationally. Their grandparents bought houses for that amount two generations ago. It is not one of the 26 federal duties to loan money to students. In a tight job market, can they repay, or will we excuse the debts as a down payment into Entitlement Villa?
How about if we leave Papa and support ourselves? Personal responsibility is the basis of a constitutional republic. Without it; with papa paying the bills, we cannot be a constitutional republic; we must be a socialist nation, where people, businesses, and governments need nursery care. The more money we take from the feds, the more they can dictate to us. You pay your bills, you make the decisions; someone else pays, he tells you what to do. Freedom versus control; it's a simple equation. Entitlement saps our strength, convinces us that we are helpless, and we become slaves. With our subscription to civic entitlement, we reap a culture of slavery.

Do we want freedom, or do we not? This is not a cake-and-eat-it-too deal, either we care for ourselves, or we let the federal government do it. Which? If freedom is our goal, personal and civic responsibility bid us abandon our place in line at the federal feeding trough, even for pet projects.
Probably all of us have partaken of the entitlement feast, though perhaps not knowingly or willingly. It has become a way of life, but it exacts an indelible toll. Federal money is habit forming. Like street drugs, it sucks your resolve, crushes your future, and makes you dependent.
What do we want? It's our decision: freedom, with its responsibility and self-sacrifice, or ever-growing social and economic slavery? We should actively make the decision, however, not continue to bellyache about entitlement while we practice it. Hypocrisy is not good for the soul.

The Game of Modern Politics like the world of Animals?

 Get it Right: Of Donkeys and Elephants, Lemmings and Rabbits

Donkeys and elephants are out. It's time to award new symbols to our two political parties. The old ones -- the smart, brave Democrat donkey and the dignified strength of the Republican elephant seemed to no longer work.
Andrew Jackson was the first politician associated with the now famous Democrat donkey. His opponents called him a jackass and he made the best of it on his campaign posters in the 1828 election. Newspaper cartoonist Thomas Nast took up the symbol, and it stuck. Nast also branded the Republicans with the elephant in an 1874 cartoon.
Our modern political scene demands new symbols that more accurately represent today's predominant political parties: the lemming and the rabbit.
The Democrats deserve the lemming, that animal which blindly follows its fellows -- seeing nothing but the tail in front, scurrying in long lines to its ultimate destination: the edge of a cliff. Impervious to reason, logic, or intellect, it willingly plunges to its death, just because everybody else has. (Never mind that this depiction of lemming behavior is refuted by scientists--the metaphor stands.) Lemming mass suicide accurately portrays those who unquestioningly follow popular opinion, in spite of obviously outrageous outcomes.
Thus, the Democrats. Impervious to the reality of a nation in dire peril as it hangs on the edge of financial and legislative disaster, they scurry forward with economic policies to take this nation over the edge of the fiscal cliff. In a nation struggling with a hemorrhaging job market, they propose health care that will bankrupt small business owners, gut jobs, and perform radical surgery on working hours. In a nation already suffocating from bureaucratic overload, they will heave 25,000 pages of new rules, with their enforcers, on society's stockpile. In a nation whose government should be wed to its founding document, they blithely flout the rule of law. They ignore laws they dislike, write self-serving new ones to replace them, and disregard the blood and tears "We, the People" paid when we signed our constitutional contract over two centuries ago.
That brings us to the rabbits -- Republican rabbits. It has a nice ring to it, don't you think? The symbol of timidity, rabbits are known to cower in fear when menaced. They live in groups and are fragile, hesitant creatures that startle easily. Docile by nature, when threatened they may make noise, lunge and occasionally even bite, but they do no harm. Rabbit lore is pitifully lacking in stories of dominant rabbits who stand up to their opponents.
Republicans have earned the rabbit as their identifying symbol. Their political role is to offer an alternative to bureaucratic overload, crippling taxation, and socialist agendas. Timid and inadequate, they cower before Democratic offensives, protesting impotently that the job is too hard -- it can't be done. They whimper ineffectually over the political advantage seized by their opponents, who bypass constitutional law in order to rewrite the country's national character. Courage and constitutional fortitude have been bred out of them as they crave the opiate called "I need to be re-elected." The art of compromise too often becomes the art of capitulation.
So, if the donkeys have become lemmings and the elephants have become rabbits, what have "We, the People" become? In times past we have soared like the eagles, with prosperity and freedom on our wings. Today we are the lambs, being led to the slaughter.