A Need for Some Soul-Searching by Jacob Hornberger

Tuesday, September 1, 2009 FROM FFF.ORG A Need for Some Soul-Searching by Jacob G. Hornberger Close your eyes, let your mind roam, and imagine the following: You are living in a country where the government has the power to round up whomever it wants, incarcerate them for as long it is wants, deny them due process and a trial, and torture them. The government is attacking and occupying other countries. It is confiscating everyone’s income and wealth and doling it out to others. The government is jailing people on a myriad of economic crimes and tax violations. Now, open your eyes. Welcome to reality. This is the America in which we now live. It is a country whose government is torturing people with impunity and is even proud of it. It is a government that has the power to actually ignore the Bill of Rights by simply labeling people terrorists. It is a country in which vast numbers of people are living off money that the IRS confiscates from others and fighting vociferously for their right to do so, no matter how much damage they are inflicting on the victims. It is country whose government is occupying two foreign countries and has military bases in more than 100 others. It is a country whose government is punishing people for economic crimes and tax crimes. What a mess this country is in. On the domestic side, you have the liberals, with their deeply engrained socialist philosophy, whose programs forcibly take money from Peter and give it to Paul, magically converting everyone into caring and compassionate saints. Never mind that they’re bankrupting America with their ever-soaring spending, taxes, and debt. On the foreign side, you have the conservatives, with their deeply engrained imperialist philosophy, whose programs entail militarism, invasions, occupations, torture, kangaroo tribunals, and destruction of civil liberties. Never mind that they’re too bankrupting America with ever-soaring spending, taxes, and debts. And then you have those multitudes of liberals and conservatives who favor both socialism and imperialism. But even those two isms are not the major threat that faces our nation. Instead, the biggest threat comes from within ourselves — the moral degeneracy that all this produces within us, a degeneracy that is reflected by increasing numbers of people who see nothing wrong with torture, political confiscation and redistribution of wealth, wars of aggression and occupations, destruction of civil liberties, and the prosecution and punishment of people committing economic crimes and tax violations. Clearly America is in desperate need of a reexamination of what this nation has become and how far it has strayed from its founding principles, principles that once made America the marvel of the world. Those principles included no income tax, no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, bailouts, food stamps, farm subsides, and other welfare, no militarism, no wars of aggression and foreign occupations, no torture, and a deep and abiding respect for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But what is most needed at this point of our existence is some mighty deep soul-searching. Is this what we as a people are all about? Rather than look to themselves and to their Creator to help them get through the difficulties of life, as our American ancestors did, modern-day Americans have chosen to render unto Caesar their lives, fortunes, and well-being, the very things that should be rendered to God. And Americans are now reaping the whirlwind, as reflected by the crises, chaos, and disharmony in our daily lives. The political and economic solution to America’s woes lies in abandoning socialism and imperialism and restoring a free-market, limited-government republic to our land. More fundamentally, however, the solution involves a restoration within the American people of faith in themselves, in others, in freedom, and in God. Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.