Jim Spence |
One of the great deceptions of the 21st century comes from politicians who pretend that somehow free-market capitalism is responsible for our problems. Just the opposite is true. Here are a few examples.
1) The housing crisis can be traced directly to anti-free market types in the U.S. Congress. Concerted efforts were made many years ago to force legitimate lenders including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to make home loans to people who were unqualified and unlikely to repay them. Big government engineered the beginnings of the housing bubble.
2) Minimum wage hiking zombies, also anti-free market types, have finally managed to use the machinery of government to price young people out of the job market. Desperately needing to learn work skills, few young people are able to benefit from the apprentice-like experience associated with their first job. Instead, the one-size fits all anti-free market crowd, has used big government to artificially set the price of unskilled labor too high. Interfering with free market capitalism has created massive unemployment amongst young people.
3) Big government is also in the student loan business. It is in collusion with institutions of higher learning. Every year millions of young people are duped into borrowing money to pay for college degrees that have little or no value in the free market. Since it is big government doing the lending, virtually no loan underwriting controls are in place. It should come as no surprise that each year millions of college students graduate with worthless degrees and immediately find themselves struggling to find minimum wage jobs. Thanks to big government they got themselves saddled with a lifetime of debt so they could temporarily memorize the nuances of Shakespeare’s plays instead of learning how to produce something of value.
4) Americans have used various forms of efficient energy to live world class lifestyles for many decades. In recent years anti-free market types, put in power by naive voters, have decided to become deluded. Their deluders are big government-grant receiving green energy types. For self-serving reasons the green crowd is teaching open hatred of our traditional energy sources. These days our own government using our tax dollars is combining forces with higher education to cultivate a hatred for the corporations that make it possible for us to fill our gas tanks. Though higher educaton lives off of tax revenues, the anti-free market types teaching at our universities cannot seem to bring themselves to admit the three largest oil companies in the U.S. alone pay some $37 billion a year in income taxes. Instead they con millions of college students into thinking these companies are subsidized. Spreading economic ignorance seems to be their mission.
5) Every working American sees his or her paycheck carved up by state and federal income taxes plus Social Security taxes, and Medicare taxes. We are told by those who want government to become even bigger that government needs all of these tax dollars and more. Unfortunately, under direct management of big government, Medicare is going bankrupt. The so-called Social Security Trust Fund has no reserves whatsoever. In fact, government has mismanaged the Social Security funds so badly, it now pays current benefits, not from money saved from the contributions of retirees’ years ago, but from the current contributions of workers. Sadly, today’s workers will need the funds they are contributing some day and they won't be there. Most young people no longer believe government can manage the Social Security system properly. Yet most young people who do vote, vote to give more resources to government. Strange.
The moral to this story is simple. Take a good look around. Chances are you are one of millions of Americans who knows we are “headed” the wrong direction. It is a very good idea to finally understand exactly what direction we have actually been going. Big government is all around us. Big government is swallowing up trillions in resources from our paychecks. Big government has seized control of the housing market. Big government controls the wage pricing associated with the job market. Big government is responsible for blindly lending trillions of dollars to young people under false pretenses. And big government has blocked perfectly reasonable energy projects like the Keystone pipeline driving up the price of fuel.
People like Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi can only continue to expand the size and scope of government if they are empowered by voters. Their big government colleagues, people from New Mexico like Tom Udall, Martin Heinrich, and Ben Ray Lujan will continue to make government even bigger if we send them back to Washington.Unfotunately, there are very few candidates running for political office in New Mexico who are actually seeking a real change in direction. Everyone who wants real change needs to figure out who the change merchants truly are. Then we need to vote for them and pray for them. We also need to pray for our country because these anti-free market big government types have already gotten us into big trouble. Even though they have already wrecked our nation, they want to go farther in the wrong direction and they want to go faster.