Randy Rasmussen has another great opinion piece in today's Rapid City Journal. I don't think you'll find it online, but I encourage you to find a hard copy, if only for this great op/ed.
(A friend who talked to Randy last week tells me he will be filling this slot each week, at least for the foreseeable future).
The piece entitled "Slices of federal pie growing" starts by examining the shameful behavior of the Democrat attack dogs a few weeks ago when Steve Kirby was merely considering running for U.S. Senate against Senator Tim Johnson. Such shameful behavior included class envy and other character assassination techniques on a Democrat mouthpiece blog in South Dakota, and even operatives staking out Kirby's house and family.
Instead of talking about important issues and the correct solutions for the problems we face, we waste our time on petty, personal kindergarten-level bickering and backbiting.
Why such lowdown and despicable tactics, just to keep a private citizen out of the campaign? Randy boils it down for us:
This is where we’ve come — where private citizens who are simply thinking about entering politics are being stalked and intimidated into dropping out.
Why has politics become so personal? Issues aren’t being debated; instead, character assassination is the political weapon of choice.
The reason for the nastiness, indeed, creepiness, is because so much is at stake in elections. As government grows larger and larger, so, too, does the power that comes with winning elections. An increasing amount of power is becoming concentrated in the hands of fewer people.
The rest of the column examines the staggering level of government dependency we've come to in a country once built on personal responsibility and the free market:
An analysis by the Christian Science Monitor last year found that 52.6 percent of Americans, including their dependents, receive income from government programs.
The column mentions that this figure is actually down a bit from the 55 percent it was when Ronald Reagan came to the presidency 28 years ago, but up dramatically from the 28.3 percent of 50 years ago. What was it 100 years ago, before the socialistic New Deal? Minuscule, I'm sure.
This is why it's so hard to get spending under control, to end pork barrel spending and earmarks: too many Americans are on the take!
Sometimes it's a government job that government employees and government unions fight to protect from being axed--and our elected representatives listen to them before they listen to the taxpayer.
But with a figure that high, obviously the taxpayer is on the take, too, in the form of various programs. That's why I often say that federal politicians bribe us with our own money. They tax us, then turn around and--especially during campaigns--tell us about all the wonderful government money they'll pour out on us, if we'll just vote for them. They're bribing us with our own money, people! They don't have a dime to give us that they didn't take from us in the first place!
Americans are going to have to develop a sense of personal responsibility and push themselves away from the federal trough of government largess.
And it will take a strong sense of morality to put the good of the nation before personal avarice. Unfortunately, we've undermined our societal confidence in a set of transcendent moral values. Too many of us now believe "Whatever is to my advantage at the moment" = right.
That's why I, like Randy, fear it's already too late to stop this expensive train to nowhere.
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