America at the Crossroads

cross posted at Right Michigan

Every night that we go to bed we can count on the fact that some government agency somewhere with properly assumed jurisdiction will have done something new and wholly designed to create a more perfect world for us to wake up in. Some new regulation or law will have taken effect at the city, township, county, state or national level.

On an even wider plane, we have treaties with other nations that govern our actions, and the UN is chomping at the bit to administer its benevolent hand of fairness onto peoples spread about the Earth. Those of us living under the rules of neighborhood associations can find themselves encumbered with rules and regulations even more narrowly focused.

If we are still a free people, we are barely free.

All of these laws, rules and regulations are for mankind's and Earth's long term benefit, and the vision behind these restraints can only be dictated by people with power. We may not agree with them all (or even know they exist) but each and every one of them was passed as someone's idea of bettering our world.

We are sitting at an important point in history where leaders in this state and country are contemplating a charge into two already existent regulatory arenas, but this charge will be carried out in such a way that the country may never be able to economically recover. Our America of today could indeed become nothing more than a remembered America; one where suffering may once again become the historical human condition. This country's ability to produce generation upon generation of children whose lives have improved on that of their parents may cease to exist, and with it the American Dream.

The steady improvements of our living standards here in America are the fruits of a free market society that encourages production, invention and innovation. We learned to feed and clothe ourselves and much of the rest of the world. We worked hard in the fields and the factories. We put the world on wheels and in the air. It was America that spearheaded the industrial age, the technological age, the information age, and whenever peoples in the rest of the world have needed protection it has been the United States that provided the decisive blow so that freed peoples might enjoy the ability to carve their own destinies.

Despite out best efforts and our best intentions, our sacrifices and our success, America is still considered by many to be a place of evil and greed. Unfortunately these thoughts are held by many within our own country. It is the evil and greed that the new regulations hope to address under the guise of health care and energy reform. The innovators and the inventors will have their hands stayed in favor of the planners that prefer the European model; a model that has routinely performed at only a fraction of America's growth, and a model that has survived even only as well it has because of the relative growth and wealth of the American consumer.

Different health care proposals in the US Congress today mandate varying (but all larger) portions of US GDP in the hands of government. A government that becomes ten percent larger will become monumentally more powerful, and a government that can conceivably control who lives and dies has few natural enemies.

Cap and trade is also on the near horizon and could conceivably be even more destructive to the American economy than is the health care fiasco. Ridiculous CO2 reduction goals are being proposed by those in our administration and demanded by those who wish to freely import the windfall of American dollars and technologies. These proposed reductions will be impossible to meet in a growing economy regardless of how much corn is processed, windmills erected, or solar cells installed. While new nuclear energy generating capacity could certainly provide the power necessary, there is so much unbridled hatred for that industry that building enough nuclear sites to even replace those scheduled to be deactivated is highly unlikely. Fossil fuels are, of course, off limits.

Government agents long ago discovered the silver lining behind economic doldrums--a reduction in green house gases that could muffle man's impact on Earth. While Jennifer Granholm and other useful tools of Gaia might actually believe many of the lines they are spewing, there are others within the movement that have no intention of ever allowing economic growth to reach a robust level again because economic growth and people are harmful. The only way to conceivably reach these highly aggressive reduction goals is to dampen energy consumption, and the most effective way to accomplish this is to punish energy usage through exorbitant pricing, by more closely regulating the entire economy, and by limiting the number of potential energy gluttons.

Consumers are being slowly transformed from being thought of as the engine that drives new economic growth into being the catalyst behind an undesired demand for more energy.

We do sit at a crossroads and the American dream is in peril. And, if you cannot tell on your own, I also have not had my coffee.