Masterful.

That’s all I can say about a piece by the Weekly Standard’s Yuval Levin that Michael Barone pointed out in the Washington Examiner as a must read.  It really highlights the technical problems and solutions we must take for our country as a whole.  It practically gives Mitt Romney the clear, positive alternative and narrative he needs to draw a contrast with himself and Barack Obama and for the people to make a choice between.  It is a comprehensive piece that touches on all the core issues that need to be addressed to turn this country around from fiscal catastrophe.  A catastrophe that would result in an unimaginable nightmare that would follow that I don’t even want to comprehend and when I try to, it greatly troubles my heart and frightens me.  Levin’s piece is so good that there is really nothing to cut out and highlight on this post.  It is that good.  However, the key point that he makes is Romney hasn’t really given Americans a clear reason, an understandable vision, and a direction that he is going to take the country.  In his article, he points out just what Romney must do and the likely fight he is to face in his words from a dying, institutional order consisting of…

Economic policy is increasingly dominated by an ideal of state capitalism, in which regulators prefer to work with a few large players in each industry—functioning essentially as public utilities—while making the lives of smaller competitors and innovators next to impossible. This is where the health and insurance sectors are being driven under Obamacare. It is where Dodd-Frank wants to take American banking and finance. It is a vision suited to managing stagnation—with big government, big business, and big labor dividing responsibilities and benefits and keeping outsiders out—rather than to enabling growth.

All of this makes it very difficult to see how America can take the necessary steps to return to a trajectory of growth in the 21st century. The way is blocked by the partisans of the status quo, who are sternly opposed to any reforms that would enable innovation and efficiency at the cost of undermining the spoils system built up over half a century.

I couldn’t agree more.  The government is no longer for the people, but for career policitians, lobbyists, and other entities that have created a corrupt racket and free-spending government agencies that are spending this nation’s people into slavery to foreign countries at best, putting us in the terrible prospect of having to go to war with angry countries uniting against us that would quite likely be the result if we default on our debt if we don’t turn this around at worst.  Don’t think this can happen?  If the economy is destroyed, how can you sustain the military infrastructure to protect our country?  We have had at least one military official state that debt is the greatest danger to our national security.  Ben Franklin stated that “”Think what you do when you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty.” Actually, I would highly recommend reading Ben Franklin’s works and autobiography on this subject.  Here is one such post I picked off of a search engine.  It is a socialist’s worst nightmare.  Any politician that openly campaigns on higher tax increases (ahem, Mr. President) and is resistant to cutting out wasteful government programs and entities is to keep this corrupt, dying racket in place and to rob you more of your freedom and liberty.  This is always the predictable end that socialist death spirals come to. It is no coincidence that establishment politicians and media on both sides would like the Tea Party to be labeled as terrorists or other bad names.  A freedom loving people is a threat to government and arrogant politicians that inhabit the halls of Congress.  That Ben Franklin, what a terrorist.

Some like to blame the rich or “evil” business owners for the state our country is in.  We have such a vast array of resources and innovative ideas that are out there.  The problem is not the entrepreneurs, it is the regulators, environmentalists, politicians, special interests, bureaucratic red tape that seemingly wants to do everything and anything from the people being able to work, make a living for themselves, and prosper.  Why?  I just told you earlier.  As Ronald Reagan so aptly pointed out “Government is the problem, not the solution.”  It’s just a few people who are arrogant enough to think they know what’s best for the nation, regardless of how much pain and hopelessness it causes those people.  The majority of Americans want to work and work hard to provide for themselves.  But there is a significant portion of the population out there, perfectly illustrated in the Occupy Wall Street movement, that doesn’t want to.  If we can create the economic climate for job growth by sweeping away the factions that are so hell bent against creating it, our country will be much better off.   I have been heartened to see how business owners and the majority of Americans confronting the Occupy movement, taking to task their entitlement mentality and laziness.

In order for me to write about all of the country’s huge problems and what actions must be taken to avert the unimaginable nightmare would take hours, if not days of thought.  Failed nations result from failed leaders in government getting elected over and over again by a lost people to solve our problems with these leaders having a horrible record of bad solutions that were to treat these problems.  Case in point.  The elections in France, Germany, and Greece.  The people of those nations are having to live with the financial decisions and consequences of corrupt, socialist politicians.  The hard road that is required of them is to cut back on government spending.  This of course when you have a huge public jobs sector as these nations have that is in gross imbalance with the private sector.  Private capital takes time to come back into the markets as free market reforms are attempted to be enacted as socialist government officials do anything and everything to prevent them from going into effect.  How awful a predicament these people are in.  They have to live in the bed that their politicians have made for them.  So what do they do?  Go back to the ideology and political parties that got them in the mess in the first place.

And guess who is at the forefront with waiting arms?  Barack Obama at the G-8 summit talking.  I won’t get into the details but that segment really was appalling in its misdirection and deception.  In an ABC News segment I saw last night, ABC News highlighted a very misleading graphic showing how the United States went one way with enacting economic stimulus (of course they didn’t talk about the debt we accrued and kicking the can down the road, the amount of people that have dropped out of the workforce, etc.) and other countries pursued austerity programs.  Austerity, free market programs suck to go through at the beginning as most change is painful at first but they work if you see them through to the end.   If the people give up, they are only ensuring themselves a longer period of misery.  The end result of this is talked about later in the post.

And this is where all power for any socialist/communist/Third World government always originates: 

When a nation’s people surrender their responsibility and independence of government to solve the problems of the day, socialism lives.  This usually happens as a result of people no longer believing and trusting in their neighbors to do good, caring for each other, and working together to solve those problems at the local and state levels.  Once people stop depending on a centralized, federal government, socialism dies.

Want to see a prime, living example of socialism’s ultimate end?  Look at North Korea.  Socialism in the end always winds up being a centralized government for the privileged few and impoverished, demoralized, brainwashed, stripped of spirit masses if it lives, or a country that becomes desolate by warfare resulting of people who are fed up with the misery they live in.  Winston Churchill stated it best “Socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”

Is this all making sense to you?  Because this is the destiny that is staring us and our children’s future right in the face, RIGHT NOW.  Ultimately, everyone in this nation as a whole is responsible for the state our country is in.  After all, for decades we apathetically elected these “leaders” to our government again and again.  We let our guard down and fell in a stupor, chasing after “financial independence” and expensive things rather than things that are important like freedom, taking care of our families, being responsible for the decisions and choices we make.  It happens when we as a nation become more concerned with what is in our bank account than doing good unto each other and staying watch over what is happening in our government.  It is what happens when we feel entitled to things rather than working hard for those things we want and live with the results that our efforts get us.  It is what happens when we stop being one nation under God and instead be a nation giving lip service to God.  It is what happens when we abuse the freedoms that our ancestors fought so valiantly for and instead become an ungrateful, incredibly self-absorbed nation.  For many years I was a model example of this attitude and am ashamed to admit that.  I have tried really hard to do my duty of working hard, being grateful for the freedoms I have, and being content with the wages that my work pays me. How self-absorbed are we becoming?  People renouncing their U.S. Citizenship to avert paying taxes is an unconscionable act of selfishness that has come to the forefront lately.  Profiteering with pretended patriotism is what George Washington called something like this in his presidential farewell speech.

You want a good model for getting the country back on track?  Look at the World War II generation.  It took living in incredible scarcity during the Depression and World War II to teach them that living selflessly unto each other, being grateful for what they have, and seeing what forces and horrible figures of evil can take shape when people in a country, impoverished and to the breaking point, put their hopes in someone who will feed them, manipulate their pain to motivate them to take them down a path the world should be alarmed at.  Can history like this repeat itself?  It just might.

One choice is either to take on what Levin suggested, do the hard work selflessly, without complaint, faithfully keeping our eye on the end result with our children in mind, and diligently holding our elected officials to account every election…or…keep on the same road we are on and reap the horrible whirlwind very soon.