We've Fallen And We Must Get Up

I spent part of this morning reading an article that was printed two days ago in the Wall Street Journal. I found it on the Drudge Report, which is where I usually start my day. The article's title is "America's Dwindling Economic Freedom". I recommend that you look it up and read it for yourself.

I think that many of us realize America is changing. It is not changing for the better and it is changing in many undesirable ways. Many times it is difficult to gain a perspective on those changes. Are we a little worse off or are we a lot worse off? We cannot always find a scale by which to measure where we stand.

According to this article, America has fallen out of the top ten most economically free countries. Think of that. The United States.  Reagan's "shining city on a hill" where the oppressed wanted to come because of the economic freedom we have enjoyed has slipped to twelfth place in the world. We now rank behind Estonia, a former Soviet Republic. We are going in the wrong direction.

But we are not alone. Our cousins in the U.K. are right there with us at fourteen. That begs two questions. How did we get here? And more importantly, how do we get our economic freedom back.

The process has taken seven years. That is the five years of the Obama regime and two of George Bush. In my opinion the slide started with a government that overspent and went way too heavily into debt. Spending, of course, must start in the Congress. But the President owns the veto pen. Maybe Bush either broke it or lost it, but he certainly didn't use it. That is just one of many mistakes that teed up the ball for Obama.

Barack Obama is a tax and spend liberal. It is his nature. It is what he was brought up to believe. That will never change. He loves big government and the control of just about everything that big government brings. He neither knows nor understands governmental limits. So under Obama we have more spending, higher taxes, and more regulation. These are all negative factors to economic freedom and economic growth.

The only way that we can restore Americas position as a star in the economic universe is to reverse the truly poor and stifling economic policies of the past seven years. The problem, I fear, is that you go down hill a lot faster than you go back up that long hill. But we have to start because we've fallen and we must get up.