The Slow Erosion

Ronald Wilson Reagan broke the air traffic controllers' union after an illegal job action. He stood up to an evil empire and reversed Soviet expansionism and broke their backs with an enterprise known as "star wars". He spent the Red Menace into oblivion with defense expenditures with which their planned economy simply could not keep up. Reagan led the nation back to her conservative roots and we flourished. America enjoyed the longest sustained prosperity in her history with a strong defense abroad, limited government at home, and a repudiation of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s. If you had been in a coma since 1985 and awoke, you could not recognize or conceive of the America in which you would now find yourself. On the cultural level, in the 1980s, gay marriage was a punchline. Now the joke is on any of us who might have the temerity to preach from Scripture that homosexuality is a sin. Under the hate crime legislation about to pass and be signed into law, those advocating adherence to Biblical morality may find themselves hauled into the dock. A cell may be in the offing and legal expense that will break defendants is a certainty. Reagan wanted the least intrusive federal government possible, even wanting to abolish the Department of Education. Now a President occupies the office who seeks unprecedented expansion of federal power and reach (but fairness dictates that one mention that the last President Bush went a long way towards federalizing education with "no child left behind"). Reagan knew the entrepreneur, the small businessman, the capitalist willing to risk, made America. Obama believes these mercantile traits are greed and wants to punish them. Obama plans to institute card check to revive the American labor movement which will still be something of a feat as Obama's cap and trade and regulatory regime are bound to destroy industry-the natural home of the union. Of course, government and service workers will be brought into line to join Obama's statist closed shop economy (closed in the literal sense with business shutting down and closed in the sense that there will soon be no "right to work" open shop states). Obama is removing the moral hazard that accompanies risk for reward and replacing it with bailouts (down to the individual debtor) and central planning. He has already nationalized more of the economy than all previous US leaders. Obama has raised the national debt by an unimaginable magnitude-Reagan spoke of billions spent on governance-to Obama, Reagan is a piker, we must now all recalibrate into trillions. Obama is even making FDR's New Deal seem like chump change child's play. We have gone from a free nation asserting her primacy to a dependency state awaiting instruction from our cult of personality glorious leader. We went from leading the world as a free people to being utterly dependant on countries that enslave their own people such as the Red Chinese to carry our debt. We are handing over natural rights and promoting perversion as freedom. We have tried to banish God from the public square. Our fall is not inevitable but a generation of slow and steady decline must be reversed with conservatives (as distinguished from Republicans) must regain Congress in the coming election and thwart Obama from utterly destroying the old order which kept us free and made us great.