I find it hard to blame them, as true faith is a hard thing to have. Faith is that ability to believe in something, even though all of the objective evidence points in another direction. It is the ability to hold a belief in direct contrast to the world around you. Like anything else in our world, while it is difficult to maintain, the rewards are also extraordinary. Faith gives people an emotional strength unparalleled during times when they should be falling apart. Faith gives a strong moral compass to those who find themselves in a world where the morals of alley cats seems a more fitting description. Faith can give its adherents courage during times when courage is needed, and compassion when it is needed most.
As with anything else in life, it can also be misplaced, misapplied, or even lied about. When that happens, it almost never turns out to be a good thing. Every first Tuesday in November since the founding of our nation, we have held elections to help determine the direction of our government. Every year, during those few months in the lead up to those elections, we have a national debate in which we try to convince each other that the person we like will do the best job of representing our wishes, values, beliefs, and best interests for the various positions which are being contested. A sundry list of housekeeping issues will also appear, mostly involving spending issues or changes in public policy concerning various organized ideas of the electorate. Every year, without fail, promises are made. There will invariably be a group of people who promise that they believe in smaller government, less spending, and share the values of the half of the electorate who believe themselves to be conservatives. Some of them will win, and some of them will not.
The first Tuesday in November of 2012 was no exception to this. In fact, 233 of the 435 people elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, which constitutes a majority of that particular institution of our federal government, fit into the category of people who promised to be conservatives. How did that work out you may ask, and it’s a good question too. Allow Charles M. Schultz to illustrate.
New Year’s Day in 2013 did not find me in a happy place. That was the day that the Republican controlled house once again pulled away the football, and again tested our faith as voters in the professed intentions of those for whom most of us voted. We will hear the same things in 2014, said by mostly the same people, and we will all continue to receive the same solicitations for funding in the mail, beseeching us with an appeal for putting a stop to the profligate spending, which will doubtless be increasing at an insane rate. Help us to put an end to the bloated out of control behemoth that our government has become will be written in emails, spoken to us from scripted phone calls, sent via The United States Postal Service, or even solicited door to door.
My prediction is that come 2014, no matter what we all say now, we will be there attempting to elect the very same group. Our faith is not what’s at issue. The faith of those for whom we are voting is. What after all led to our Republican controlled congress to agree to a deal that saw an increase in every American’s tax rate in exchange for, well nothing good? What John Boehner and his team of crack experts born apparently without spines got in exchange for admitting that Reagan’s economic boom was the evil that caused our economic malaise, (which is nonsense of course,) was an actual increase in spending, on top of our already disastrous budgetary deficit. That was then trumpeted by our petty little President as the mere beginning of his, “balanced approach.”
The good news in all of this of course is that John Boehner has officially announced that he fully intends to grow a spine for future negotiations, yay! The bad news of course is that Boehner, along with many of his colleagues, lack the faith to follow through with this promise once things begin to look tough for them. They lack the faith that the electorate will stick with them should they be blamed for what ever happens once the nonexistent and totally manufactured crises become perceived reality. They lack the faith that we voters will adequately reward them for not bringing home more pork than their neighbor. They lack the faith that free market principles will work sufficiently well to overcome the allure of those snake oil salesmen selling free goodies from public largess. They lack the faith in us, that we will be able to see through the empty promises of free crap and find the virtues of social and economic freedom more appealing.
Milton Friedman once said that electing the right people is not what we should be concerning ourselves with. We should be concerning ourselves with the task of making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things. My faith is not in John Boehner, or even Jim Renacci, (who thanks to redistricting, replaced Dennis, “the complete loony tunes out there idiot,” as my representative, and also by the way voted against the fiscal cliff deal.) My faith is in the Constitution, and the wisdom of our forefathers. While it is true that I am not ecstatic with the direction our nation has taken recently, I also have faith that the very same document which founded our nation gave us the tools to reverse problematic courses, and eventually we’ll figure this out. I have faith that anything that can be done by man, can also be undone. I also have faith that our country is worth fighting for. Our freedoms are worth fighting for. Our God given rights, which by the way were only recognized in the Constitution rather than granted by it, are also worthy of one hell of a fight.
November of 2012 was a disaster for our country. The fiscal cliff deal was one of the many consequences of that disaster, there will be more. This President and his minions will be ushering us from one looming manufactured and not quite real crisis to another for the next four years. It’s how they roll. We still need to fight this in order to save our country. Obamacare is the law of the land, but as with anything that can be done by man, it can be undone as well. Fortunately, economic markets are self correcting, if slow sometimes. I refuse to give up, and I will continue fighting for this nation. I also have faith in my fellow man, and more particularly in my fellow American. I have this faith because our nation is not a decade in age, nor was it founded just prior to Woodrow Wilson becoming President. Our nation is 239 years in age, and that economic freedom that has been blamed for today’s ills, albeit wrongly, is also the very same engine that produced the vast wealth that has allowed us to survive so well while we dismantle the very engine of our success. In this we should take the lesson well. The leftists never fully disappeared due to the collapse of their model nations. They continued fighting on, until they took control here. We should keep fighting also. After all, we have the virtue of the better message.
Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.
