What have we forgotten?

Wednesday-January 26, 2011

What have we forgotten?

When you want to win in politics you run and you sound like a conservative. On the whole the Presidents speech last night was good it was not earth shattering. I believe a lot of republicans agreed with him in principal however every thing remains in the details. Why is it when a politician gets involved in our lives they always want to enact new initiatives? What we should be demanding of our government is to just stop the spending and let the free market do what it does best.

The encouragement of genuine market forces are what are needed to turn the economy around. A freeze in spending is good but how does that translate to the regular guy? Every time a new initiative is announced it takes money to establish it. Every time a new initiative is announced it takes resources to manage it. It does increase the size of the bureaucracy because of the resources it consumes. Remember government does nothing to produce revenue it takes the revenue from us and it decides what to do with it.

Any body can throw more money at a problem and initiate more programs to remedy a problem. Why can’t we just stop and let things happen by themselves without the investments that politicians think we like to hear about. Let’s face it last nights speech was the beginning of the presidents re-election bid.

As of January 25, 2011 - 222 annual messages and State of the Union Messages had been delivered by Presidents; of these, 73 were delivered in person by the chief executive. This is a pretty simple procedure. Every year the President is invited by Congress to deliver a State of the Union address. This year we also listened to a rebuttal given by the Republicans. The Tea Party had their rebuttal to both. Haven’t we had enough messages and enough formulas to listen too for this year?

America is a simple country but when government gets involved it manages to make the most simple of tasks monumental. I wrote this week that there are over 1000 panels that the President seeks advice from. Even if one of the heads were right in their assessment how would the president ever know?

The Presidency is a hand’s on job. There is no training school or online training class to teach a prospective office holder. This is why our choice every four years is a crucial choice for the future. The president said last night that “we can win the future.” We are living the future because of the past decisions that some of us warned others of. To my point how can any one know who is right any more?

Spending is not investing adding bureaucrat’s is not improving government and spending freezes do not slash budgets.

We have a tendency to put great stock into the individuals we place in the office of the presidency. We had an impeachment not to long ago. We had a failure of one president in just four years. And we had a successful president that served for eight years and that set up an economy that would grow for a quarter of a century. I am not naming names but I think you know who I am talking about. The most successful presidents kept things simple with simple messages. I was criticized not to long ago by being one of these simple thinkers. It hurt for a minute then I considered the source, it came from a bureaucrat.

The President said we must not re - fight the battles of the last two years if things need fixing then fix those things so we can move forward.” I agree we must now fix everything that this President and his Party has broken so that we can move forward. This is a simple approach to a simple problem.

Every example that the president cited last night about little companies and people doing big things had nothing to do with government telling them how to do it.

The thing I didn’t hear last night was two simple words. Liberty and freedom, these are simple words but they are what America is all about. Don’t forget it!

Liberty does not come from restrictions and regulations. Freedom comes from the ability to compete to secure a bright future so that we can win tomorrow.

Gregory C. Dildilian
Founder and Executive Director
Pinecone Conservatives

A footnote: The last paragraph of Washington’s First State of the Union – January 8, 1790 read “The welfare of our country is the great object to which our cares and efforts ought to be directed, and I shall derive great satisfaction from a cooperation with you in the pleasing though arduous task of insuring to our fellow citizens the blessings which they have a right to expect from a free, efficient, and equal government.”