Watching as America’s freedoms disappear

Thomas Jefferson once said that "the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." He could have been looking into a crystal ball focused on 21^st century America.

He would have seen a government that has grown past what he and the others who worked so diligently to establish a nation dedicated to personal freedom to a degree that would have sickened him.

He would have seen a government with its dirty fingers jammed deeply in the pockets of the citizens it was established to serve, taking their money and using it to the benefit of other citizens, and which has grown so far beyond its intended limits that it controls how children are educated and how businesses operate, and has created a sub-class of citizens who have been taught to depend upon government for their very subsistence.

Another thoughtful American president, John F. Kennedy, noted before his life was cut short by an assassin that "every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people."

Why is it that so many Americans do not recognize what was so clear to Jefferson more than 200 years ago and to Kennedy 40 years ago?

The government of the United States over the years has inserted itself into the business of business so far that it bears significant responsibility for the debacles of the mortgage banking industry and the Big Three automakers.

Trying to legislate home ownership for people who could not afford to own a home set the stage for the excesses of mortgage bank and GSO executives.

Siding with labor unions and through over-stringent OSHA standards, environmental laws and fuel efficiency standards, and high corporate taxes, the government put extreme pressures on the domestic auto industry.

And now we have elected a President who openly wants to “spread the wealth around,” and who in concert with a heavily Democrat-controlled Congress will seek to give tax breaks to 40 percent of Americans, increase taxes on businesses and the most productive Americans, impose additional restrictions on carbon-based fuel use, impose a government-run health system, and a long list of other horrors that will give us even more government intervention in our daily lives than we already have.

Jefferson and Kennedy must be spinning in their graves, and wondering how much longer can the Great Nation survive?

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