The history of the world, in a few paragraphs

I strongly believe that to understand what's happening in our world today, we have to look at history. Many of the problems we face are not new on the world stage. As we look at events, and what solutions work best, it's amazing how the pieces of evidence all start to come together. I could go on forever, but to sum it up, here's how I see it:

Throughout world history, mankind has suffered under different forms of the same theme: government oppression. From medieval Europe through today, monarchies, dictatorships, fascism, communism....too few people have truly lived free. Then the founding fathers changed the world. The constitution was born. People were free to create, work hard, and achieve the impossible. It is no coincidence that America, though only a tiny fraction of the world's population, literally, for a time was giving the world almost everything: electricity, the car, the airplane, the computer. People left everything to come here to live "the American dream."

But what made us so special? I think it's because this nation was born of a people that valued liberty over convenience, that had to prove they treasured freedom because of the sacrifices they had to make for it. Because of this they carefully, with the aid of heaven, crafted a system of government that would put personal liberty above all else, above convenience, above arbitrary notions of "fairness". A government that would protect equal opportunity, not equal results. A government that is above all LIMITED.

Please take time to read the words of the founding father's. They were very leery of government power. They for the most part looked at it as a necessary evil. Think of government power on a scale from 0-10. 0 is no government (anarchy), and 10 is total government (think communist Russia or Nazi Germany). Most of the world, throughout most of history, have flirted somewhere 7 or higher. The founding fathers wanted just enough government for a civil society (police, roads, schools etc) but not much more. Think of the founding fathers having a goal of being like a 3 on the scale. The founding fathers simply believed our freedom came from God, not government. It was up to each individual to choose for himself his path in life: success thru hard work, education, taking risk, or even having the freedom to fail. Keep the government out of people's way. Unless one citizen is depriving the rights of another (murder, theft etc), be very cautious about interfering.

Then in the early 1800's, a philosophy called progressivism took root and spread thru both the republicans (Teddy Roosevelt) and democrats (Woodrow Wilson, FDR). Essentially progressives believed that society was fast evolving. True, governments in the past were sort of barbaric, but progressives felt mankind was now evolving past the human nature of craving power, and thus government could step in to help move society "along". In other words, Government can now break the bonds of an old-fashioned constitution to speed up things that society on it's own was just taking too long doing, like ridding the nation of rich and poor, and giving everyone everything from healthcare to education. This reasoning helps us understand why progressives feel so comfortable about "spreading the wealth around" and pushing for universal health care, and recently, free college education. It's all about the guarantee. It's OK for government to grab power from private companies (fire GM's CEO), or meddle in personal contracts (AIG execs), or spread the wealth around (Obama), because the government is helping people. Kinda like your Mom trying to "help" your love life by setting you up on blind dates...thanks but no thanks. Progressives erroneously assume that because America's great, more government means America gets even better. They could not be more wrong. It is the people, not the government that make America great. It's like a teenage goth druggie boy who falls in love with a sweet, kind, pure christian girl. "Wow she's somethin" he thinks, "if only I can get here into drugs, rebel against her family and her faith, and drop out of school with me she'll be even better."

Progressives have duped so many Americans into an vicious cycle of addiction. The government gains power, gives more handouts to the people, they become more entitled, less willing to risk for gain because now it's freely given to them, so they demand more, thus giving the government more power to provide for them, and it goes on and on, gaining momentum all the way.

But the problem is a government cant just give and give without taking from somewhere else. People (the private market) create wealth, government simply redistributes it, which always leads to the unintended destroying of it. Think about it: Microsoft, Ebay, Disney. These all started from nothing to create thousands of jobs and millions in wealth. Yes Gates and Disney made more than their employees, but they created the jobs for those employees and many people along the whole economic spectrum are reaping financial benefits from these companies. Contrast that with government programs. For instance the proposed "green jobs". One thing Washington has got to learn is that most of the time you don't have to blindly guess the impact of your policy ideas, because somewhere some other country has tried it already. In the case of green jobs, our friends in Spain have already been guinea pigs in that disastrous experiment, but that doesn't seem to be deterring Obama. Paraphrasing a recent CNSnews article: According to a recent study by Dr. Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at Juan Carlos University in Madrid, every “green job” created with government money in Spain since 2001 came at the cost of 2.2 regular jobs, and only 10% of the newly created green jobs became permanent. President Obama, in fact, has used Spain’s green initiative as a blueprint for how the United States should use federal funds to stimulate the economy...(end article).
Government programs do not create wealth. This simple fact helps explain why the great depression lasted so much longer here than in the rest of the world. It was almost a perfect correlation in the experiment which the whole industrialized world participated. The more a country's government meddled in the economic recovery, the longer and deeper the great depression affected them. The statistics prove it.
Washington has many weaknesses, but a BIG one is that many of our politicians have about ZERO business experience. They've never run so much as a lemonade stand, yet we let them make multi-billion dollar decisions, most of which are disastrous, on a very regular basis. Good intention + bad economic sense doesn't equal successful economic policy. The progressive movement can be summed up perfectly with this very familiar saying: "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." JRD