ECONOMICS 101

The amount of economic ignorance on the part of a good portion of our citizens is alarming. Either they never learned basic economics in school or they refuse to acknowledge basic economic facts because of partisan political considerations. Either way, it is appalling.

There has been a blurb bouncing around the internet for a few years that cannot be attributed to any one person (I understand Ronald Reagan used this in one of his speeches back in the 80's), but it is succinct and to the point and makes a lot of economic sense. It goes like this: “A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. The majority will then vote for the candidate who promises the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy” (ex: Ancient Greece). Doesn't that remind you of the thinking of the present day liberals and Progressives?

Today, many people think they are entitled to a “free” this and a “free” that supplied by the government, even though the worst practitioner of running anything, is the wasteful and inefficient government itself. Our politicians, in their mad rush to perpetuate their careers in the executive and legislative branches of government, will go out of their way to promise prospective voters largesse (freebies) from the public treasury, like it was their own money, in order to “bribe” the voters into voting for them by giving the voters something for nothing.

Think of all the “freebies” that many of the people are getting today, thanks to our feckless politicians. The list is enormous, but some of the most egregious examples are, food stamps (46 million people are getting them), sub-prime mortgages (even today after the mortgage meltdown led by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a couple of years ago), health care waivers (for certain favored unions and companies), grossly generous pensions and perks for government workers (and politicians), subsidies to farmers and some corporations, and our foreign aid to countries, some of which don't like us very much, etc., etc. And you wonder why our fiscal house is in disarray and headed for bankruptcy?

The politicians who are using “class warfare” to squeeze money out of our producers and job creating entrepreneurs, are doing one of the basic things exactly what the father of Communism, Karl Marx, said people should do to hasten the demise of Capitalism. Look around you, in a little over 8 years we have added 10 trillion dollars of debt to our already over burdened economy. Multi-billion dollar deficits, now and into the future, cannot be sustained. Our GDP today is over $17 trillion, but our debt is almost $20 trillion (more than 3 trillion dollars more than our GDP). Eventually, the “Piper” must be paid and we'll be unable to pay him (could that “Piper” be China?).

When people have little or no incentive to work hard and produce in hopes of getting a monetary reward without it being taken by the government (through excessive taxation and regulation), that's the day we will lose our liberty and our freedom to an impersonal and wasteful government. We will then become the future Greece, Venezuela, Cuba, or another Third World nation. We're heading in that direction under the leadership of the politicians that are running the country now. We can't overcome that direction if, we the citizens continue to elect the politicians that have caused this situation to become the problem that it has..

Basic Economics 101 should be taught to all our students so that sound fiscal policy can be initiated and sustained in our society. Today we have a gaggle of leftist, liberal progressives dominating our educational system and basically teaching our younger generation, students with “heads full of mush”, the glories of Marxism/Socialism. If we can't reverse that trend, we are goners, or should I say our children and grandchildren are goners. I hope that's not what will happen, but all of us must stand up now and be counted and you must champion our free enterprise system and you must stand up to the onslaught that is being waged against it. Let's institute basic Economics 101, not just talk about it, in all our schools, with teachers and professors who believe in life, liberty, and private property. We are not a Marxist, Socialist, or Communist country, we are a democratic republic, let's hope we can keep it that way.

Conservative commentary by Chuck Lehmann