© 2009 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.
Despite the citizen protests this week, our country will never return to the America of our founding because we have become a wholly different people. For the last century, highly destructive political concepts have been planted in our political fields.
The fruits of these ideas have moved us little by little to a nation where our original values of limited government along with personal control of our responsibility and independence have been replaced by total ownership and control of the people by the government.
Today, every event and crisis is seen by our government as a reason to increase control over citizens. In our future are at least seven harvests:
• First, we will stop talking about the national debt. There is no will or ability to pay it. For generations, our leaders have known the national debt will never be retired. Occasionally, they try to not increase the debt. But no one ever talks of repaying it. Our country will default the debt when the interest becomes unsustainable.
• Second, health care will be run entirely by the government under the guise of extending it to all citizens. We will have little say about our medical treatment. Our mortality will increase with government cost-containment and use-of-medical-resources rules. We geezers will have no chance to receive really expensive treatments.
• Third, personal ownership of firearms will end. Little by little over the last century personal firearm ownership has declined in other countries and ours. At some point firearms became illegal in those countries, as they will be here. Easy or hard, our firearms will be taken from us like they have been in other nations. The only armed people will be the authorities and the criminals.
• Fourth, censorship and federal, centralized dominance will prevail. The government will not tolerate criticism. Those voices will be squashed. State governments will be forced to give their powers to the central government as our Constitution is discarded.
• Fifth, privacy as Americans have known it will no longer exist. Every day government will increase surveillance of citizens to support total government control. At every moment what you say, write, read or do will be electronically recorded. There will be so much data that what we do may never be watched, but it will be recorded.
• Sixth, discretionary use of resources by citizens will end. The consumption of fuel, electricity, water and food will come under the direct control of the government. We will be forced to follow resource use guidelines because, little by little, we have allowed that power over us. How much water, power or food we use will have to conform to rules established by the government. The statement, “This is all you need,” will be applied to people deemed by the government as wanting more than they need.
• Seventh, productivity of the society will decrease due to government rules. The overall wealth of the nation, entrepreneurialship and innovation will decline. Further, the variety and amount of available consumer products will decline. Most impacted will be our children who will not be given so much from our shrinking discretionary funds.
Most people will adapt to this complete government control of our lives by keeping their heads down and mouths shut. Our group memory of liberty will erode and then disappear.
Is it too late?
Can we change our fate? While we might be able to slow some changes, without a huge sustained change groundswell by the citizens, we will be systematically overwhelmed by the control-hungry government. The majority of American citizens will never see the danger to their liberty.
We will have this future because the ideas and concepts of total government control of the citizens were planted and harvested in our political fields repeatedly over the last century primarily by Congresses of both parties along with both Presidents Roosevelt and Bush, and Presidents Wilson, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Clinton and now Obama.
We can only harvest in the future what we plant today.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.