David

Karki

Read David's bio and previous columns here

October 13, 2008

Another Time For Choosing 

“We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in doing so lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well, I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.” – Ronald Reagan, October 27, 1964

If I might channel Yogi Berra for a moment, it's like deja vu all over again.

Another October, and again America stands on the precipice, apparently ready to jump off the cliff of Marxism. Never mind the suffering and oppression left in its evil wake everywhere it's ever been tried. Never mind the disaster it's turned into each time we've but tasted it's foulness here – something we seem to do about every 15 years or so, from LBJ's Great Society to Jimmy Carter's malaise to Bill Clinton's failed health care takeover and now to Barack Obama's con-artistry – and then wisely spit it out of our mouth.

No, this time we're on the verge of diving headlong into socialism run by crooked far-left politicians, in reaction to a financial problem they caused by implementing socialist ideas.

The antecedent of the housing bubble, the bailout of the mortgage industry and the resulting credit crunch was the wrong Marxist belief that housing was a “right.” That led to government ordering creditors to lend to people who couldn't possibly pay back, and then to the lenders demanding government reimburse the losses. This bubble grew, then inevitably burst, as liberals like Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd denied all the while that this was courting disaster. And now, taxpayers are left holding the $700 billion tab – which hasn't done anything to slow the market's steep slide since its rushed passage.

To top it off, the Democrats are using this self-made crisis to attempt to outright nationalize the entire credit and banking industry. The Emperor in Star Wars would be impressed by this elaborate manipulation in order to create a dark empire.

None of this mess would have happened had Democrats not indulged the stupid Marxist idea that housing is a right. Let's get this straight, once and for all: There is no such thing as a “right” to any material good or service. For if there is, then someone else must be forced to provide it lest the recipient's right be violated, and in so doing the provider is stolen from, if not enslaved. Thus, to indulge the idea that housing, or education, or health care is a right is to do nothing less than revive servitude.

And Sen. Barack Obama did precisely that in last week's presidential debate. He openly, if not proudly, declared that he thought health care was a right. The irony of a black man endorsing de facto slavery was apparently lost on him. But I'll give him this much – he was honest, for one night at least, about being a flat-out communist. When placed alongside a Congress run by equally hardcore leftists in Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid, it paints a truly frightening picture of what could very soon be if we hand Democrats unchecked power.

It also reveals a truth: The Cold War never really ended, as thrilling as it was to see Germans dancing atop the Berlin Wall in 1989. The forces of totalitarianism are still with us, among us. And they must be fought in the remaining days of this election, or else we'll get a big taste of what it might have been like had the Cold War turned out the other way. That's a flavor of which I'd rather not partake. Reagan's words are more relevant and applicable today than they have ever been, and we'd do well to keep them in mind on November 4:

This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down – up to man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order – or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

And lest you think I'm exaggerating the stakes, that it couldn't go all away that fast, one more Reagan gem:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

If we fail to think through what we may be about to do, “one day” will be some time early next year.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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