One Last Chance by Robert Gore

Yesterday’s election was important. President Obama’s election and reelection may well have represented the high-water mark on how much government the American electorate will voluntarily impose on itself. This election can rightly be seen as a repudiation of Obama, but it must be understood what has been repudiated.

The Democrats are the party of government, and nothing more. The bedrock of government is the philosophy of command and control, a philosophy ever more unsuited to a world of breathtakingly rapid technological and economic change and increasing individual empowerment and autonomy. Obama is a proponent and symbol of unchecked expansion of the government and its power. Someday, in an ironic sort of way, we may thank him for so dramatically demonstrating why that expansion is doomed to failure.

Obama has shown that government is incompetent: the Obamacare rollout, the VA scandal, the Ebola response, the shovel ready projects that never materialized, Middle Eastern and Ukraine follies, the immigration fiasco. He has shown that government is corrupt: the green energy boondoggles, crony capitalism, stimulus that mostly stimulated his campaign donors, the endless fund raising. He has shown that government lies: the Obamacare prevarications, the Fast and Furious scandal, the Benghazi scandal, the IRS scandal, the AP scandal, the NSA revelations. He has shown that governments poses the ultimate threat to civil liberties and representative government: the NSA, his pen and phone, the AP and IRS scandals, the dubious maneuvers used to win passage of Obamacare, ignoring laws he does not agree with, Harry Reid essentially closing down the Senate. Obama is nothing new; governments have always been incompetent, corrupt, dishonest, and dangerous to their peoples’ liberties, but he has managed to concentrate the minds of the people with the most to lose.

This cannot be termed an opportunity for the Republicans, most of whom have the same command and control mindset as their opponents, very few of whom have a clue as to how creakingly archaic, how doomed to failure, that mindset is in today’s world. The Republicans stand on the slippery edge of an abyss. Any further expansion of government is not going to be by the voluntary choice of the electorate, it is going to come by force. On present trends, tax rates will rise to confiscatory levels as debt and entitlements bankrupt the country. A draft will be instituted as a government that can do nothing right at home attempts to order, militarily when necessary, the world to its liking. Rising discontent will be met with repression and force.

The Republicans “opportunity” is to start inching away from that abyss. The expansion of the government must be not slowed, but stopped. Its power, debt, and unfunded liabilities must shrink. US defense policy has to again become US defense policy. Decentralization, organic adaptation, individual autonomy, and the centrifugal forces of entropy and chaos make the supposed “order” of a Pax Americana in the Middle East or anywhere else an impossibility. If Republicans realize that their victory is a repudiation of Obama and his love of government, and if they stop being the other party of government, they have a chance to reverse the slide and begin what will be the long, slow task of restoring America’s freedom and its greatness. Readers are advised not to hold their breath.

Amazon

Kindle

Nook