Can a Nation Built By Giants Survive the Disability Industrial Complex?

Vivek Ramaswamy got himself in some hot water a couple of weeks ago when he tweeted about American culture. He’s wrong on the big picture, but his comments about American workers hits a nerve… 

While the US Constitution and free market capitalism set the foundations for American prosperity, it took a rugged, passionate, free people to build it. From George Washington to George Washington Carver to millions of other Americans, the United States was carved out a continent of forests that seemed to go on forever, fertile plains, vast mountain ranges and scorching hot deserts.  Over time American frontiersmen, settlers and entrepreneurs forged a country that seemed to have all of God’s blessings in abundance.

Conditions were rarely easy for most Americans throughout most of our history. Coal miners spent 12 – 16 hour shifts in dangerous mines in which they sometimes couldn’t even stand up. Frontiersmen built a homestead and a farm out of a thick Appalachian forest while fighting brutal winters and a tenacious Indian population. Slaves toiled for years at backbreaking work during freezing winters and boiling summers. At the end of the 19th century over 50% of Americans still lived and worked as farmers, a far more dangerous job than most people understand. The industrial revolution brought sweatshops and drove a thirst for steel, trains and petroleum, industries that brought new dangers.

One sometimes has to marvel that the colonies survived long enough to coalesce and challenge the British for independence and then go on to grow and prosper (mostly) for over 200 years as it changed the world.

Were the Americans who carved a nation out of a continent somehow so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who crisscrossed a continent with railroads, telephone lines and highways so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who won two world wars and sent a man to the moon so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who invented the mechanical reaper, air conditioning, vulcanized rubber and the microchip so different than Americans today? Not based on DNA they weren’t. But that doesn’t mean they were the same. While the DNA of the American people today is no different than that of the people who invented the elevator or the light bulb, the American people writ large certainly appear to be.

Go back little more than one generation and it seems like Americans were something of another species. Compared to 2025, they appear to be relative supermen. In 1970 there were 79 million people working in the United States supporting 1.5 million workers on Disability Insurance (SSDI). That means that one person out of every 52 workers was on Disability… Fast forward 5 decades and it seems as if the country has turned on its side. By 2024 the number of Americans working had risen by 100% to 161 million people. During that same period however, workers receiving disability insurance skyrocketed up 380% to 7.2 million. Today, instead of one out of every 53 workers being on disability, it’s one in 22! That number is particularly interesting because the United States of 1970 was a far grittier place than the United States of 2025.

First off, the United States in 2025 is a much different workplace than the one that existed in 1970. In 1970 fully 25% of the American workforce worked in manufacturing while 50% worked in the service industry. Today, 8% of the American workforce works in manufacturing while over 70% of workers work in the service industry. Given that designing a website, taking an order at Chili’s or greeting a guest at Marriott is generally less dangerous than welding together various pieces of a Ford Ranger or operating a blast furnace at a US Steel plant, America should be a safer place to work. And indeed it is. The death rate for American workers in 1970 was 18 per every 100,000 workers. By 2023 that rate had dropped to 3.5, a decline of 80%.

But of course work is not the only place where one gets hurt. Today, virtually everywhere Americans go everything seems safer. Cars have seatbelts, antilock breaks and airbags. Houses have GFCI circuit breakers in bathrooms and kitchens and smoke detectors in almost every room. Lawn darts are but a distant memory and towns across the country require helmets for bicycle riding and virtually every appliance and medicine comes plastered with book length warning label. At the end of the day, America has become a far safer place to live and work than it has been at any time in its history.

But somehow in that much safer America, the total of people listed as disabled and receiving disability payments has skyrocketed:  The government spends more on disability than on food stamps and welfare combined.  American workers paid .5% of their paychecks for SSDI when it began 70 years ago, but in 2022 they paid 2%.  That means that $2 out of every $100 an American worker earns goes to support someone not working.

How is that even possible? Have Americans become weaklings, unable to stay healthy? Has some unknown affliction made us incapable of working? No. There is an affliction, but it’s not biological. It’s called the nanny state. From judges who rubberstamp virtually every claim they ever see to a quarter of applicants suffering from musculoskeletal injuries – which conveniently enough cannot be detected by doctors – to outright fraud (more)(more)(more) and states seeking to shift costs to the federal government, SSDI is a symbol of much of what is wrong in America today, where in 2022 fully 4.5% of working age Americans were on disability. The worst thing about this dysfunctional program is that the fraud keeps people who are in real need of help waiting in line, sometimes to die.

When government decides to play the role of caretaker and redistribute wealth from workers to everyone else, it should come as no surprise that many people will choose to jump from the working pool to the everyone else pool. For more proof just look at the food stamp program over the same 50 year period. While the population has increased by about 75% since 1970, workers by 100% and disability by 380%, food stamp recipients grew by over 1,000%!

The economics of the welfare state, including the “disability industrial complex” cannot be sustained. If the record of the last 50 years were to be repeated over the next 50, in 2075 the country would have 320 million workers supporting almost 30 million people on disability and 450 million people on food stamps. Those numbers are simply unsustainable, particularly if the goal is to Make America Great Again.

American workers and entrepreneurs have together created the greatest wealth and prosperity the world has ever seen, but eventually the numbers stop working.  The thing I think Ramaswamy misses is that it was inevitable that the spirit that helped forge a nation out of a continent and dot it with jewels like the Empire State Building, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge would reemerge and shrug. That’s what happened in November. For it to make any difference however, the nanny state will have to be eviscerated, and not just the regulatory part of it. The redistribution apparatus will have to be dismantled too, and the disability industrial complex is a good place to start. 

The Cost of Prosperity - Distraction From What Really Counts

Americans are busy people—but the real risk in the lead-up to 2024 is that we may be too busy to pay attention to our last chance to preserve our liberties.

In one respect we’re no different than any other people on the planet given that our primary needs are food, water and shelter. Beyond that however, Americans enjoy a life of leisure opportunities that virtually no one else on the planet enjoys. Not leisure that’s measured in hours worked as in France or Germany. Workers in most developed countries work fewer hours per year than Americans do.

No, what’s different is that Americans have so many ways to spend their leisure time: Motocross. Shopping. Video games. Countless cable channels. Amusement parks. Golf. Swimming. Skiing. Football. Baseball. Golf. Putt putt golf. Pickleball. Off-track betting. Gymnastics. Theater. Karate. Star Trek conventions. Habitat for Humanity. Cornhole. BBQ competitions. Quilting competitions. Beauty pageants for kids. These are only a tiny fraction of the myriad options Americans have at their disposal to entertain themselves or spend their leisure time watching or participating in.

If one were to compare the spectrum of activities available to the average American with the equivalent spectrum for any other country on the planet, it wouldn’t take long to see an enormous difference. Many countries share some of our pursuits, but the depth and breadth available to Americans is unparalleled. None of this came about by accident. The reason Americans have dozens of sports and thousands of activities to participate in, from grade school to the senior center, is because the nation has been so prosperous for so long, and the nation has exemplified creativity for things both consequential and not. The result is a nation where most people have available a level of entertainment and leisure unparalleled in history.

One consequence of such is that Americans are busy. So busy, in fact, that they forget to pay attention to some things that really matter—specifically, government. In a perfect world, no one would have to pay much attention to the government because it would be run like a well-oiled machine in the background that wouldn’t cause any trouble. But that’s not how governments work. Our Founding Fathers knew that, which is why they gave us a government of separated powers with staggered terms for those responsible for exercising them. But even such a near-perfect document cannot stand forever in the face of avarice and the lust for power.

That greed and lust for power is the defining characteristic of what we call the Swamp. And it was enabled by a plethora of acts that strengthened and emboldened the apparatchiks who man it. These included Executive Orders by JFK and Nixon giving federal employees powers or “protections” they’d never previously had, as well as a 1984 Supreme Court case that required courts to defer to federal agencies as it relates to rule-making when there is ambiguity in the legislation.

Together, these and other acts made the Swamp possible. They built a federal government where it’s almost impossible to fire anyone, and agencies essentially get to decide who and what they regulate while those affected have limited redress. So basically, we have agencies that decide what laws they want to write staffed by people who can’t be fired regardless of their failure, incompetence, or criminality.

Of course, every two years, the cacophony that is American life is made that much more dissonant by elections. Most Americans, however, unfortunately, spend less time learning what’s really at stake in those elections than they do selecting teams for their March Madness brackets or wondering what’s going on in the dysfunctional Kardashian universe. The reality of this disaster was demonstrated 15 years ago by John Ziegler.

This situation might have been acceptable 100 years ago when the federal government was relatively small and had little discernible impact on most American lives. Today, however, when the leviathan of the federal government seeks to control virtually every aspect of our lives, it’s simply not. There’s a tipping point in every endeavor in life, and the lifecycle of a Republic is no exception. Leaving the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked: “Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” He responded: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

Two hundred and thirty years later we are on the verge of losing it. The problem is that too many Americans have no idea what the danger is and have little interest in finding out. They’ve spent so much of their lives enjoying the leisure and entertainment our Republic has made possible that they’ve forgotten that the foundation of freedom and prosperity upon which those conditions are built are not ordained by God, not set in stone, and not guaranteed. The conditions underlying Americans’ freedoms and prosperity are far more fragile than most recognize but, like frogs in a pot of slowly warming water, they’re succumbing to the creeping threat. Indeed, there’s an inverse relationship between government micromanagement and citizens’ freedom.

In what might be the single most crystallizing example of government micromanagement of Americans’ everyday lives since Barack Obama’s attempts to destroy the suburbs, the Biden Administration is considering banning gas stoves and a plethora of other items Americans use in the normal routine of their daily lives. Think about that…

Natural gas has been a key element of cooking in America for centuries. It’s a clean-burning fuel, cheap and plentiful, with a variety of sources, mostly in red states, which makes it hard to control. So, if Democrats can’t control the supply of something, they simply take control of the demand. Doing so in this case has the twin virtues of harming the economies of red states while forcing Americans to buy new, “green lobby approved”—read: dysfunctional and expensive—appliances. All, of course, in the name of the “Climate Change” hoax.

These and literally tens of thousands of other federal regulations are the cost to Americans of not paying attention, summed up by the notion that politics is downstream from culture. Hollywood and the media destroyed American culture, which made turning Washington’s alphabet departments, agencies, and bureaus into tools of tyranny easy.

The question is, can anyone shake the American people out of this political stupor long enough for them to recognize the danger they face? Will Americans rise to the occasion in 2024, or will they instead continue to eat the fruit from the tree of liberty, oblivious to the rot of its roots?

Perhaps a paraphrasing of Martin Niemöller might help:

First, they raised the minimum wage, and I cheered because I had a job.

Then, they destroyed public education, and I didn’t act because I sent my kid to private school.

Next, they limited cable rates, and I applauded because I saved $20 a month.

When they came for my light bulbs, I didn’t react because it made me feel good to help the environment.

One day, they said ethnicity was more important than ability for college acceptance, but I said nothing because I’d already graduated.

They increased taxes on the rich, and I didn’t care because I wasn’t rich.

Then they came for my gun, my car, my job, and eventually everything I hold dear, but there was no one left to stand with me because no one remembered what real liberty was or how it was supposed to be protected in the first place.

Freedom Will Not Go Quietly Into That Good Night

Adolf Hitler said: “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” That line may never have been as true as it is today. What is that lie? It comes in many flavors: America is racist. Donald Trump is racist. Trump supporters are racists. Republicans are racists. You might notice a theme here. Now repeat the above and exchange the word racist for fascist...

None of those things are true. But truth doesn’t matter. Why? Because truth is not the objective, power is. In 2020 America, if you disagree with the left on anything from abortion to immigration to tax cuts to global warming you are an enemy who must be destroyed. And the primary weapons of choice are the slurs of racist and fascist.

And the beauty of it is that no proof beyond the assertion is necessary. Before he became president Donald Trump lived most of his life in front of cameras in the most media obsessed city on the planet. Morning shows, talk shows, radio shows, news shows, press conferences, grand openings, the Apprentice… you name it and Trump was there. As we all know, Donald Trump basically can’t keep his mouth shut, yet for the first 67 years of his life this man who never met a camera or microphone he could resist somehow kept the secret of his virulent racism a secret.

Then, once he became president he did such racist things as fund Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) at a level no president ever had, label the KKK as a terrorist organization, signed into law sentencing reform that had been called for by black leaders for decades, pardon the late boxer Jack Johnson and the very much alive Alice Johnson. He also supported “opportunity zones”, pushed for school choice, both of which disproportionately benefit minorities, and at the same time created an economy that brought about the lowest black and Hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded. But he’s a racist.

The proof Donald Trump is a fascist is equally strong. He arrests and jails any reporter who dares to question him. He uses the CIA and FBI to spy on anyone who disagrees with him. He imprisons judges who rule against his policies. He trains the military on people who are peacefully protesting his policies. Clearly Donald Trump is a fascist.

To understand how accurate Hitler’s words are look no farther than a Newsweek piece from July: Half of Americans Think Trump Is Racist and an Additional 13 Percent Are Unsure.  That is simply staggering, and the reason is simple: In excess of 90% of the media coverage of Donald Trump is negative. “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” Add to that the manipulation by Facebook, Google and Twitter and you get us to where we are today with an election that was not only stolen, but with 1/2 the population thinking that a flawed but good man is racist and a fascist... 

The above is only a symptom of the real problem however. The real target is not Donald Trump per se, but rather the half the population who support him, and the truth is they hated us long before Donald Trump came onto the political stage, most clearly seen when we were called racists and Nazis for opposing Barack Obama in 2008.

Democrats and their comrades get away with it because they know we respect the rule of law. In 2008 when we lost to Barack Obama we didn’t riot.  We peacefully protested and went to the voting booth. In 2010 we went to the polls and the Democrats lost 64 seats in the House and we finally turned the Senate red in 2014. That is what conservatives and Republicans generally do. We don’t riot when we don’t get our way. Even when we’re cheated, as happened in 1960 with Nixon, 2004 with Dino Rossi and 2008 with Norm Coleman, we don’t try to burn the country down because we respect the rule of law.

But the question is, what if there is no real law to respect?  What if there is one law for the suckers who play by the rules and basically a lack thereof for Democrats? For decades Democrats have fought attempts to secure out our voting process by continuously opposing voter ID, supporting same day voter registration and encouraging mail in balloting among other things. Any attempts to ensure credibility of the system were labeled “racist” or called “voter suppression” and usually withered on the vine. When they won in 2008 they proceeded to weaponize the federal government against the citizens. In the ultimate demonstration of such tactics, the Obama administration used the IRS to silence opponents, spied on media who dared question their actions and turned the FBI and the courts into a vehicles for the launching of a coup d'état against their successors. And now that they think they're poised to take complete power again, they’ve threatened to pack the Supreme Court, grow the Senate, eliminate the Electoral College and keep “lists” of their opponents. There's a word for that and it's not liberty.

What do 75 million Americans do if they discover that despite playing by the rules they’ve been duped again, this time on the single most important election of their lifetimes, with the future of the Republic literally hanging in the balance? They are told by the same media who spent four years pushing the fiction of Russian collusion that they should simply shut up and accept defeat, regardless of the myriad examples of voter fraud, both big and small.

Lincoln said “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.” He was referring to the issue of slavery, but the line might also well apply here today. When fully half the American population loses confidence in the integrity of the election process upon which the nation is governed, loses confidence in the media - both traditional and social - who have been lying to them for years about fictional election tampering, and come to believe that their political opponents will use everything from rioting to mayhem to outright theft to gain control of the government, what should they do? What is their motivation to continue to participate in a process where the game is rigged?  What is their motivation to continue to engage in a system where one side believes the Constitution is but a barrier to be subverted rather than the rulebook by which the nation is governed? What is their motivation to be constrained by a Constitution which their opponents disregard at every turn as they seek to undermine the very rights it was written to protect? What is their motivation to engage in a process legally when they know that their opponents seek to bastardize that very process to accumulate more power and eviscerate the very ideas upon which the nation was founded?

I don’t have the answer and I’ve no idea where we are on a spectrum of anarchy vs. tyranny, but I’m certain that the closer Democrats push the United States towards tyranny the closer we get to a point where liberty loving Americans look for other means to protect the God given rights the Constitution was written to guarantee.  What that looks like, I’ve no idea, but Carl von Clausewitz once said “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” That’s something to keep in mind as the Democrats continue their march to eviscerate our Constitution and destroy the country that has given so much to so many for so long.  I don't believe that freedom will go quietly into that good night...

Barack Obama cracks the foundation of American success: Trust

One of the beauties of a free society, particularly one built on the rule of law, free markets and individual liberty is that people are often free to pursue things that are simply not possible elsewhere. Entrepreneurship in the United States thrives like it does in no other place. From restaurants that let you choose how you want your food cooked to more cable channels than your cable box can handle to the frivolity of branded apparel and Christmas antlers, the United States is a study in the science of the division of labor.

Over the course of our American history, the division of labor has grown ever more important. While 150 years ago most people would have hunted or grown their own food, built their own houses and made their own clothes, today virtually none of us do any of those things. That’s because of the division of labor. We have come to depend on one another to do what we do best. Whether as individuals or as cogs in the wheel of a corporate machine, the division of labor allows us to live far richer lives than we ever could if we had to do everything for ourselves.

A key element of that reliance on the division of labor is trust. I will only purchase food from a vendor if I am confident they are not going to poison me. I will only fly with an airline if I’m confident they are sufficiently attending to safety that the plane will not crash. I will only allow a doctor to operate on me if I trust him not to come to work drunk and kill me.

So too it is with the government of free nations. The United States is one of, if not the most free country in the world when it comes to speech – except for college campuses of course. Citizens have put their trust in the Constitution and the government it created. It is that trust that allows them to go about that making widgets or doing whatever they do. They trust and expect – perhaps foolishly – that their elected officials will at least run the government with objectivity and honesty if not with competency and efficiency. Because the citizens trust the public servants to enforce laws and do so with detachment, the citizens themselves don’t have to enforce them or scrutinize official’s every move.

A complementary element of that trust in government is the First Amendment’s protection of the Freedom of Speech. A trust that you can speak your mind and the government will not penalize you for it. Nowhere else in the world is freedom of speech protected like it is here. Try standing on a street corner in Saudi Arabia and badmouthing the Koran. Try speaking out against the government in Russia or Venezuela. Insult some protected group in Canada or Europe and you’ll likely find yourself in court or shackles.

Free speech, particularly as it relates to opposition of government officials is as American as apple pie. Despite the vile and contemptible things said about him with great regularity and impunity, George Bush was hardly the first president to feel the sting of slings and arrows – John Adams and Thomas Jefferson also withered viscous storms of opposition – but he may end up being one of the last. And America will be much worse off for it. Why? Because Barack Obama has succeeded in destroying the trust the American people have in their government.

President Obama’s use of the IRS to tilt the election playing field in his direction is repugnant to everything Americans hold dear. Americans don’t mind a spirited fight, and even expect minor examples of local irregularities, after all, you can’t expect an election where over 100 million people vote to come off without a hitch.

Barack Obama however has done something that no American can condone. As he was getting ready to have his rear end handed to him in 2010 Congressional elections, he decided to use the police power of the government to ensure that he would be victorious two years later.

Of course he was not so transparent as to send in New Black Panther party stormtroopers to “encourage” voters into pulling the Obama lever. No, instead he clandestinely used what is possibly the single most intimidating organization in the United States, the IRS. To be clear, the IRS is far from an efficient bureaucracy, but there is a difference between a dysfunctional tax code and a tax enforcement agency that is explicitly political. This is the latter: not only did his IRS delay or refuse tax exempt status for 500 tea party and conservative organizations across the country, the agency also targeted conservatives and Romney donors for intense scrutiny and public backlash.

Barack Obama won election by a total of over 6 million votes – 5 million of which came from California and New York alone. The election would have gone the other way however if just three states had changed from blue to red: Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Together they cast 19.7 million votes and Barack Obama won the three by a total of 550,000 votes. Not coincidentally, the epicenter of the IRS scandal was Cincinnati Ohio.

To put the magnitude of this malfeasance in perspective, had each of those 500 organizations swayed a mere 500 citizens each in either Florida, Ohio or Pennsylvania, Barack Obama would have lost the election. But they were not able to do so because the IRS violated the public trust by becoming an extension of the Obama campaign. How many other organizations never formed because conservatives could see the writing on the wall and were not willing to jump through hoops just to be stonewalled? How much money was not donated to these organizations and others because donors feared for their livelihoods?

Whether Obama directed this travesty himself, or he merely pointed out the targets for others to harass, he is responsible for the destruction of the American trust. By turning the IRS into the arm of a police state, where one’s associations, donations, speeches and friends are scrutinized in order to stifle dissent and harm your business, he has undermined the single most important element of American society: Trust.

Americans have always looked at the actions of government with a critical and often partisan eye, but for the most part they have bought into the idea that whether it’s the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Education or even the IRS, most of government is run in a largely objective, if often inept, fashion. By using the IRS to intimidate opponents and guarantee himself a second term, Barack Obama has opened a fissure in the American body politic. One wonders how big it will grow and whether the republic can survive. If citizens begin to see the IRS as a thought police, they will begin hiding income and cheating on their taxes, rationalizing that they will be unfairly targeted regardless. And it won’t be limited to the IRS. If citizens begin to believe that the Justice Department is but the enforcement arm of whoever is in power they may begin to react differently when targeted. If citizens believe that the EPA or the Department of Energy have become political vehicles for the reward of friends or the restraint of enemies of the regime in power, they are likely to begin to disregard their rules or edicts.

At the end of the day a free society depends on the willing trust and voluntary participation of the citizens. Barack Obama has broken that trust in a big way. The question is, can the fissure be repaired so that citizens remain willing to openly engage in political debate rather than scheme under the cover of darkness with designs on upending a system they feel is no longer fair? The country survived a relative vaudvillesque version of this scandal forty years ago that ended up in a president’s resignation. Before that FDR, JFK and LBJ were experts at using the agency to pressure opponents, but their misdeeds rarely saw the light of day thanks to a servile press happy to carry their water. Barack Obama isn’t so lucky however and thanks to the Internet and a conservative press his crimes are difficult to deny, even for the blindest of followers. Whether he serves out his term or not, Barack Obama should be seen as the pernicious narcissist he is who sacrificed the public trust for his own self-aggrandizement. For anyone who has been paying attention, none of this is a surprise.

The Transparently Hypocritical Barack Obama

Way back in 2007 crony capitalism was a bad thing. For years the left had been telling anyone who would listen that the Bush administration was in bed with the oil industry and that Haliburton was given preferential treatment because of its friends in the White House and as a result ended up bilking the government out of millions if not billions of dollars.

As a result, candidate Obama declared “I'll make our government open and transparent", "meetings where laws are written will be more open", and then President Obama, on his third day in office, stated: The way to make government responsible is to hold it accountable. And the way to make government accountable is to make it transparent. Gone would be cronyism, inside dealing, opaque transactions, and what’s more, citizens would have five days to read every bill that landed on the President’s desk before he would sign it.


The whole “five days” deal didn’t last long, and neither did much else in Barack Obama’s promise of bringing government transparency to new heights. What’s worse, the violations of that transparency pledge were greatest during the passage of arguably the single most important – and worst – piece of legislation ever to come across a President’s desk: ObamaCare. Euphemistically named the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare single handedly would open the door for regulation of anything in the American economy and the lives of the American people. The legislation inspired protests that have not been seen in decades. Needless to say, ObamaCare was and is controversial.

So it’s particularly interesting that Barack Obama chose that legislation to introduce some of his most potent behind the scenes dealings. Although it was known at the time that the administration was discussing the various elements of ObamaCare with Big Pharma, it wasn’t until three years later that the hypocritical interworkings of the negotiations would became public. In typical Washington fashion, the President traded (dropped) legalizing the importation of drugs from Canada and using government purchasing power to drive down drug prices in exchange for the pharmaceutical industry spending tens of millions of dollars in support of ObamaCare. The point here isn’t that the President engaged in anything particularly unusual, but rather his hypocrisy in explicitly promising an unprecedented level of transparency and then to immediately engage in secret deal making upon taking office.

Earlier this year, in an astonishing demonstration of the President’s disdain for the notion of truth in advertising, the Obama administration has decided to eliminate the single best tool taxpayers have for keeping an eye on where Washington is spending their tax dollars – as well as those borrowed from China – the Census Bureau’s Consolidated Federal Funds Report, and replace it with a variety of opaque reports that will make much more difficult to take an accurate accounting of government spending. And coincidentally this just happens to occur at the very moment when the government is spending more money on more obscure projects than at any time in US history. So much for the “most transparent administration” in history.

And unfortunately, it’s not just the transparency... (although there's lots more on that, like the administration's abysmal record on FOIA). The Obama administration is also hotbed of cronyism. When the stimulus bill passed President Obama said: “Let me repeat that: decisions about how recovery money will be spent will be based on the merits. They will not be made as a way of doing favors for lobbyists.” Skip ahead three years and, surprise, surprise, it turns out that the President might not have been entirely truthful.

Fully 80% of the $20 billion the Energy Department spent or guaranteed in the green energy sector during the first three years of the Obama Administration went to Obama donors, campaign bundlers or donors to the Democratic Party. Then there is the union payback via the nationalization of the auto industry. Or the administration’s attempts to get a general to perjure himself in support the Obama donor backed, and now bankrupt LightSquared. And who can forget the Navy paying $16 a gallon for “biofuel” from a company being advised by an Obama transition team member.

One could go for pages with this stuff, but why bother? One of the primary drivers behind “Hope and Change” was the promise that the Obama administration was going to usher in a new era of government transparency, accountability and an even handed administration of government operations. Three years later those illusions have been pierced and as Mr. Perpetual Fundraiser begins to send his already turbo charged campaign into overdrive, it might be helpful to remember that old joke: “How can you tell when a lawyer is lying? His lips are moving.”

How much is your country really worth to you?

Over the course of the last ten years millions of brave men and women have served in the United States military. Those people, those fathers, mothers, sons and daughters deserve every ounce of respect that Americans of all stripes have.

It says a lot about both the country and these individuals that they still see something in the United States worth defending and that they were willing to sign on the dotted line to do so.

Unfortunately, that is simply not enough. Not that those brave men and women aren’t giving enough, but rather, the great sacrifice they have been and are making today is simply not sufficient to save the United States.

The United States is far more than a military power. In reality, military power is but a small part of what makes America great and a leader in the world. People around the planet have been flocking to watch Hollywood movies for decades. They’ve also been sending the best and the brightest of their progeny to study at our universities. During the Cold War it was Levis and Pepsi that Soviet citizens were clamoring for. According to Interbrand, ten of the ten most valuable consumer brands in the world are American, including names like Coke, Disney, McDonalds and Google. None of these things were accomplished with a barrel of a gun. From Star Wars to Big Macs to our private and public universities, people around the world see the United States as a place where seemingly everything is possible, where great ideas come from and where anyone can find success. Little of that is the result of American military intervention. It’s the result of accomplishments and achievements Americans have forged throughout the nation’s history… although winning two world wars certainly didn’t hurt.

The bottom line is, the United States’ military is strong because America is strong. Not the other way around. And what has made America strong is her people, the individual freedom and liberty they have enjoyed since June 21, 1788 and the economic strength that freedom has created.

Unfortunately the liberty and economic strength that underlie two centuries of success are under assault today like they have never been before. As much as I dislike Barack Obama, the blame is not all his. He may be the worst president this country has ever had, but the problem that is undermining the foundation of American greatness has been going on for seven decades. No, the majority of the blame does not fall on the shoulders of Barack Obama, or even the collective presidents of the last 70 years… The fault for the situation we find ourselves in is the fault of the American people.

A free people get the government they deserve and we are to blame for what Barack Hussein Obama has wrought as well as what George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and their predecessors did. Government is a dangerous weapon in the hands of mere mortals with their natural failings of greed, vanity, arrogance and avarice among others. Our Constitution was specifically designed to temper the worst inclinations of men and to limit the scope to which a citizen’s life might be impacted by government action. Staggered terms, a Senate appointed by state legislatures, an independent judiciary a bill of rights. Everything in our Constitution was written to give citizens the greatest degree of liberty possible.

None of that matters when the government simply decides it wants more power and the people do nothing to stop it, or as in the case of the 17th Amendment, assist in the takeover. A government of men can be expected to try and expand its power and reach and James Madison’s Constitution and George Mason’s Bill of Rights were intended to stop such expansion.

Today however both might as well have been written on an Etch-a-Sketch. How does this happen? Simple. Two symbiotic developments resulted in the situation we find ourselves in today. The first is the division of labor. When Cyrus McCormick freed mankind from the yoke of the farm he unleashed a parabolic curve of innovation such as the world had never seen. The specialization wrought an increase in the standard of living that was exponentially more powerful than anything that had come before. Simultaneously Americans began to enjoy something that few people in the world had ever enjoyed and no people had had on that scale: leisure time.

The division of labor meant that while citizens were able to focus on their jobs stamping engine blocks, editing books, testing scientific theories or flipping burgers, everything else was magically available to them at far less than it would cost them to produce or procure on their own. As their lives became more silo like, they began to understand less and less about things with which they had little contact. For a while they relied on family, friends and community organizations to help fill in the gaps. Then government stepped in and decreed that it was their job to tell citizens what was good and what was bad and what needed to be done, when, and by who. Government is, after all, there to help… isn’t it?

Then of course there is the money. Government largesse becomes a powerful weapon when combined with citizen’s ignorance. As government started providing more information and benefits it started issuing more and more regulations. Today we have the situation where the government seeks to control virtually every aspect of a citizen’s life. Indeed, half the population pays no income taxes, one third of the population relies on the government for most if not all of their income while the entire population is burdened with regulations around every corner. This regulation is particularly onerous to entrepreneurs and businessmen, the backbone of American progress.

Today, with individual liberty and capitalism under fire, the foundation of American greatness is withering away like the grains of sand through an hourglass. The question is, can the country be turned before the sand is fully drained? This is one battle that the men and women of the military cannot fight for us. This is a battle that will be fought in the voting booths across the country. But the real battle is going to go on long before November 6th. The question is, are you going to join the battle? How far are you willing to go to preserve the greatest nation in the history of the world? Politics is rarely a pretty thing and sometimes it causes real pain when you disagree with people close to you. Such is life. Would you rather keep the peace with your brother in law or friend at the cost of watching everything you hold dear slip away, or do you want to take a chance and try and change someone’s mind? It may not work. You might end up talking to yourself or having someone yelling at you. The battle between now and November 6th is not a hot war like what is going on in Afghanistan, but it no less important.

The pending nomination of Mitt Romney demonstrates that conservatives cannot depend on the GOP to light a fire under the American people about the dangers of the leftist agenda and profligate spending. The danger posed by your mother in law or your best friend are nothing compared to the Taliban or Al Qaeda and the other real dangers our men and women in uniform face every day. How much are you willing to do to make sure that their sacrifice is not in vain? Are you willing to do what it takes to help send the Democrats home? Are you willing to do what it takes to help put the United States back on track to greatness and prosperity? Pick up the phone, buy your buddy a beer. Start a conversation. Have a dinner party. Post something on Facebook. At some point someone has to do it. If not you, who? If not now, when? How much is your country really worth? How much are you willing to do for her? Are you going to sit back and watch as the sands of liberty and prosperity pass or is a free Republic worth fighting for? Twenty years from now when someone asks you what were you doing during the most important election of your lifetime, what do you want to be able to say? Do the things today that you will be proud to speak of tomorrow... make a difference, help save your country.