David Zanotti, president of the American Policy Roundtable, recently wrote an interesting article that was partly about the unending vigilance required to maintain the blessings of liberty. In his article titled Again…, he illustrates his meaning with the following:
What is the one word we hear from our kids and grandkids? When little ones find something they truly enjoy they ask us over and over to do it “again.” This is the way of children. What they love never grows old. So what happens to the rest of us as we grow older?
I intentional left the most personal part of the illustration that preceded the quote just as the biblical illustration that follows only because of the need to keep length of this post to a minimum.
Following the illustrations, Zanotti gets to his central point about liberty’s repetitive requirement.
The battle for real liberty is never done. It has to be waged over and over again in every generation because people forget.
Every year we face the same old challenge at the Statehouse and on Capitol Hill. Politicians and the media elites are trying to bring forth “new ideas” that sound exactly like the “new ideas” that failed years ago.
Zanotti continues with several examples of policies that failed to produce promised economic or social benefits. One example was the “outcome based education” reform. Another was the promise that casino gambling would solve our state’s budget crisis. Zanotti seems to bemoan the fact that no seems to remember the debacle of the Clinton “Health Security Act of 1994” or the failure of Medicare and Medicaid to deliver as promised since 1965.
The same can be said about the federal stimulus and bailouts. Past bailouts helped banks, corporations, states, and foreign nations only to increase the burden on taxpayers. They most recent ones helped banks, GM, some states and local communities for a little while. However, the promise that the billions of stimulus dollars would revive the economy has not been realized at least for main street businesses and mortgage owners.
Moreover, most Americans fail to see Obamacare as helping either. If anything, Obamacare will increase our national debt and cause health insurance cost to rise. Worse than that, Obamacare serves another hammer blow to our liberty. For nowhere does the U.S. Constitution give federal bureaucrats the right to dictate what individual citizens will buy and not buy. The Constitution does empower to them to regulate commerce and to facilitate the prosperity of willing citizens and not big corporations. However, taxing the rich in order to distribute wealth to the poor does not appear to be Constitutional either.
As Zanotti reiterates in his article,
Thus we must re-tell the story of Liberty—again.
We must recall and restate those first principles found in the Scriptures—again.
We must present the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—again.
We must email and call lawmakers—again.
We must go to the Statehouse and Capitol Hill and testify—again.
We must recruit and train new leaders—again.
We must cover the costs of all these activities—again.
Source: The American Policy Roundtable eNewsletter, February 10, 2011.