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And Rightly So

And Rightly So

August 27, 2010

It's being reported as I write this column for our August Bulletin that enrollment in the food stamp program has hit an all-time high. 40.8 million Americans have turned to the government for help feeding themselves and their families. At the same time, unemployment is up again, nearing the 25-year high it hit last year. Experts suggest that the economy is headed into a deeper slump: there's more talk of the dreaded "W-shaped" or "double-dip" recession.

Coincidentally also today, Byron York is reporting on a disturbing trend at Obama's Justice Department. Eric Holder' Civil Rights Division has started writing slush funds for "qualified organizations" -- read ACORN-style allies of the Democrats who work to organize support for yet more Democratic electoral victories and more government interference in everything -- into their settlements with businesses accused of illegal discrimination. Nobody's a fan of AIG, but do we really want a million dollars of their money (or is it our money? Don't forget their generous bailout) funneled to community organizers as part of a consent decree settling charges that they discriminated against minority borrowers? Or money from a lawsuit charging that a landlord in LA's Koreatown discriminated in favor of Koreans to go to an organization that funds -- wait for it -- more housing discrimination lawsuits? Especially since neither company was actually found guilty of the discrimination?

And that's a drop in the bucket compared with the Obama administration's serious attempts to muck with the economy. There’s Obamacare, the wrecking ball poised to smash the American medical system. There are the repeated attempts to pass "global warming" bills that would drastically curtail our energy use -- and the promise that even if none of them pass, Obama's EPA will still regulate carbon dioxide (yes, the gas we all exhale in every breath) as a threat to public health. There are the apparently eternally recurring rounds of "stimulus" that suck money out of the private sector to prop up the public bureaucracies in big-spending states. (And to buy literally millions of dollars of signs touting the stimulus and President Obama!)

It's all the work of a class of people who see what we’d call the real economy -- private companies making, transporting, and selling things that individuals are willing to pay their own money for -- as a cash cow to underwrite their re-organization of our lives according to their plans.

And, you know, it's not just the Obama Administration. I live in Montgomery County, Maryland. Here's a small selection of the outrageous boondoggles I've read about in the local papers in the last couple of weeks. The County Board gave one mall $4 million for renovations to lure Costco to locate there. And another $350,000 to some Colorado consultants to research our demographics and -- no kidding -- what kinds of recreation citizens are interested in. Meanwhile, somehow 40% of our police manage to tap into disability benefits when they retire.

Look, you and I are conservatives. We're not looking to politics to supply meaning for our lives, or to make us feel we're smarter or more compassionate than other people. We'd rather invest our time and money in what's really productive and meaningful: making something of value, whether it's a garden, a book, a back yard tool shed, or a flourishing small business; giving our children a real education; worshipping God and learning to love our fellow man.

But we have to stop this disaster. We simply can't afford it any more. We've already borrowed and wasted so much money that it's hard to imagine ever paying it back. A future in which America can't pay her debts is not the future we want to have to live in. And unless we rein in our political class, we will.

Americans are hurting already, but there's still a long way we could go down. Nobody in America's making clothes out of flour sacks, yet. The American economy is remarkably resilient. But the trajectory we're on is a bad one. If you want a picture of what a real economic disaster looks like, just read The Great Depression: A Diary. It's not something we want to risk for ourselves, our children, or our grandchildren.

You'll be reading this column about two months before the 2010 election. If you're not already volunteering, find a local candidate who will vote against the status quo; call his campaign office; ask how you can help. Now is the time for each one of us to do something very concrete to make sure the winner in this election is the American people, not the political class.

--Elizabeth Kantor

andrightlyso@ConservativeBookClub.com

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