Much has been written about our 250th Anniversary by people much smarter than me. I particularly enjoy the Opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal. Here are two really good, recent ones by Gerald Baker and Barton Swaim.
I also re-read the post I wrote 13 years ago for our 237th Anniversary, before Trump, Covid, and so much more (but Iran was there!). If you have another minute, please take a look: “Who or What Will Fill The Leadership Void in Our Nation?” Sadly, we continue to elect our Representatives by gerrymandered, safe-seat districts, the predictable outcome of racially motivated overreach, which has helped create our perpetually dysfunctional Congress. When will we make our Congressional elections competitive again, requiring local compromises and constructive dialog/solutions before our elected leaders even get to D.C.?
My one small thought for this Anniversary, from someone who has been alive for one third of our nation’s entire Constitutional History, is this: The loudest voices now are, sadly and ominously, crying out with a Declaration of Dependence.
The Democratic Socialist BS demands for free transportation, free childcare, free higher education, and free healthcare, for government controls on rents, for higher taxes, and for open borders, is a cry for making more and more of us dependent on the twin illusions that any scarce resource can ever be free, and that governments can somehow provide for the general populace’s needs better than private initiative and the free market, buttressed by strong families and faith-based charities (which tend to include improving behavior, not just economic assistance).
This Declaration of Dependence will have exactly the opposite effect from what its delusional proponents promise: more bad housing, higher costs, worse services and, eventually, tyranny. It has always been so in every other attempt at greater government dependence, because governments are made up of fallible people (see Swaim) who will always rig the system to favor a certain group, which is why our Founders were so keen on checks and balances, and not on human perfection, which was the implied foundation for every other subsequent, failed revolution in France, Russia, China, Venezuela, etc., etc.
We should today reassert our Declaration of Independence, both as a nation from other governments, and as individuals from our own government. With caveats for those who are truly impaired by serious injury, disease and/or misfortune (and not assisted by family or charity), nothing good can come from making more of us more dependent on government programs in our daily lives.
We need more individual initiative to use our God-given talents, whatever they are, to become the best that each of us can be. And we need less talk about group-grievances, victimhood, and government intervention to “fix” outcomes (either via large corporate programs, or individual handouts).
As our Founders knew, our only real dependence should be on the God who created us and who gave us our unalienable Rights, among them Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
To believe that we can depend on government to provide more than the protection of those God-given rights with reasonable laws and policing powers, along with the national defense, is foolish and will ultimately fail, with grave consequences for all of us.
So, for this July 4th, I gladly declare my Dependence on God, as well as on the family and community He has surrounded me with.
But I hope as a nation that we will individually make a Declaration of Independence from government, which, when it becomes too big and all-invasive, always leads to terrible outcomes. We appear right now to be on the edge of that abyss. I pray that we will pull back.
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